Because I can’t ever seem to stop tinkering, I’m building yet another new family web site. This time, however, I’m (hopefully!) pulling off some cool tricks!
- Self hosted, not paying for a VPS or something. Yes, we all know that’s nothing special, except in this case I’m on a Starlink satellite service which uses CGNAT. I’m working around that by using a Cloudflare tunnel.
- While the site is WordPress, I’m using the ActivityPub plugin to connect to the Fediverse – which means if you want to follow along and have a Mastodon account (or Pixelfed, or Pleroma, or Firefish, or whatever) you should be able to simply follow me (@[email protected]) and/or Bren (@[email protected]).
- Super cool side effect: if you reply from your Fediverse client, the reply will show up here as a comment on the post!
Obviously, load times are potentially going to be an issue, what with a tunnelled connected over a satellite service that isn’t designed for hosting content. Fingers crossed that will me slightly mitigated by the Cloudflare CDN as well as using an external service (SmugMug) to host and serve photos – it’s only the actual web page coming over the slow service, the supporting elements should be fast.
I’m certainly not going to promise that it will all work seamlessly; I’ve been doing this IT thing for long enough to know that stuff breaks in strange ways. Would I try and run a business like this? No. But for our dodgy personal site it should be plenty good enough.