Playing with tools instead of getting stuff done and other useless pursuits

This website is running WordPress on an Amazon EC2 instance.

If I were looking to keep a blog, this is not how I would do things, I’d just use a service.  The micro EC2 instance is slow, I have ensure Linux is patched, Wordpress is patched, etc…  But playing around with the server is as much fun as writing the blog.

Here are a few changes to the site recently:

• I run the EFF Privacy Badger on my browser at home, and I couldn’t believe how many trackers were running on my self hosted site, because I don’t track, and I don’t have ads.  I dropped the Youtube videos, that got rid of many (I just link to Youtube now instead of embedding).  I can’t remember what else I did, but now I’m just down to Google Fonts, used by the template.
• The site now defaults to HTTPS.  With default settings, Qualys rates the default Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Apache HTTPS setup on this site as an A.  Its funny how many important companies struggle to get this right on their sites, given how easy this is.
• Recently update the site to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - the latest version of Wordpress didn’t like the version of PHP on the previous LTS version I had been running (not sure what that was).  This is the third VM on which this site has been hosted.
• I hadn’t been resizing photos and the site got REALLY slow.  I’ve resized the largest ones - it’s not painfully slow anymore.  I may eventually move the image hosting to S3, but keep the server/DB on EC2 - I expect the site would run faster without increasing costs.

Update October 5th, 2019:

• Google Lighthouse ranks the site load speed at 100
• Finally got the fonts loading locally with the OMGF Wordpress plugin. The site no longer has any external trackers!