About/Colophon

About Weblog:

weblog follows my focus; it is subsequently, and unfortunately, extremely unfocused. The weblog has quite a large amount of ’technical’ articles about my self hosting experiences running the weblog. It has even more mini ramblings about random things. I’m currently making an attempt to improve my writing skills, and am in the process of writing longer-form articles for this weblog in the future.

About Me:

A quick biography of myself: I was born in Appalachian Kentucky as a triplet (one brother, one sister) to my mother who was/is a Kiwi (New Zealander), and my Father who is a Chinese American. When I was nine or so my family moved to Illinois where I spent the rest of my childhood. I moved to New Zealand after finishing secondary school to go to university, but did not complete a degree and moved back to the US. After coming back to the states I enlisted in the Marines – who are sending me to all sorts of places!

My interests are hiking, reading classical literature, fitness, and computers. Recently I’ve begun trying to learn a bit of Latin. I credit much of my curiosity and knowledge of literature to my mother who homeschooled myself and my siblings through primary school.

My contact email is site-mail@joshualiu.org.

Technical Details About Weblog:

I use hugo to generate my site. My hugo theme is entirely custom, though I draw much of my inspiration from Tyler McKee’s website. One of the goals of this weblog when I was making it was to exclude JavaScript; this weblog is entirely JavaScript free. I regularly tweak the theme of my weblog to be w3c compliant, to be accessible towards all web users, and for the “look of it” to exclude as much visual clutter as possible.

I use nginx to host my site. It’s installed on a Debian distribution on a Vultr VPS. I use TLS certificates signed by Let’s Encrypt to handle https. For real-time monitoring of the web traffic coming into my server I use goaccess through the terminal. I delete web traffic logs after a few days.

My server also runs an onion mirror of my weblog (j7fdhuj7hly22vxrhlibh7khuigiqza4tw27d72oofemfgta2lqqzwqd.onion), and I’m thinking about putting a mirror of my weblog on i2p as well. I get almost no traffic from the mirror, but it’s cool to have an onion address to show to people.

For generating emails for my weblog I use nouri that makes composes emails based on my RSS feed. In the future I plan to implement a way to send out emails from my own server as opposed of sending them through a third party.

History of Site:

I first started hosting my blog in 2022 after following the guide on landchad.net. My old blogs are located here (zoraster blog) and here (zoraster highlights). I knew nothing about self hosting, website design, or writing when I first started blogging: but have become steadily better the last few years.

My old .txt archive of internet articles which used to be hosted on this domain has been moved to my subdomain www.PilledTexts.com.