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+# website migration
+
+## Why?
+Initially this website was hosted on GitHub pages, using [jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com)
+and some theme. I'd needed a site up and running quickly so the domain I'd listed
+on my CV actually existed.
+
+### Big Tech
+This seemed like a suitable solution at the time. It was quick to set up, didn't
+require me to set up infrastructure of my own and looked alright.
+What I didn't realise was how much control I was giving up, and to who. Since then I've
+grown more wary of """big tech""" (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix),
+with good reason. I've started distancing myself from these companies as best I
+can, lifted-and-shifted the static site generated by Jekyll to a non-AWS vps
+(that I still have my reservations about, since I don't control the hardware).
+
+### Regaining Control
+In an attempt to regain more control over the software I use, I also shifted my
+email onto there from the company that provided my DNS to the same box and set
+up git on there, pushing updates to both """my""" instance, and GitHub.
+
+All the dependencies on Jekyll, Ruby Gems and the theme I was using found
+themselves in my sights too. There's nothing particularly complex about static
+website generation, so why was there this entire ruby-based builder nonsense?
+Why was I having to pull in gems with securty issues just to generate some HTML?
+It seemed like this could be achieved with much simpler, mature, familiar unix
+tools.
+
+## How?
+Since I was already hosting a number of my projects both on GitHub and this
+instance, and I already had a webserver set up to serve the Jekyll guff it was
+pretty easy to migrate away from Jekyll.
+
+I set up a server-side git hook that parsed the Markdown files that were being
+consumed by Jekyll. This did introduce a dependency on [discount](https://github.com/Orc/discount),
+but it removed a lot of dependencies on ruby guff. If need be I'd be comfortable
+writing my own Markdown implementation too.
+
+You can view the source for the site, including the scripts that the server-side
+git hook calls either through the [git](https://git.owens.tech) link here and
+at the top of the page, or on [GitHub](https://github.com/MatthewOwens/website).
+
+With discount generating the post HTML, it was trivial to throw together a few
+header HTML files, a stylesheet and a few scripts to glue it all together.
+
+### Gains
+One of the big things this allowed me to do was to implement a remote staging
+environment. This lets me view the site on this instance with pushed to the
+'develop' branch before merging to 'master' and deploying to what you're seeing
+now. This is pretty valuable since I'm running a different distro
+(gawk vs mawk caught me out, didn't realise that gensub() was a gawk extension).
+
+Deployments are considerably faster than using Jekyll too, since the site
+generation is much faster.
+
+### Losses
+I had some tagging functionality with jekyll that I've not implemented, but with
+the amount of posts that I had on the site it really wasn't necessary.
+If I actually need tagging in the future then I'll implement it.
+
+### Lessons
+* Jekyll is bloat
+* awk can be gawk, mawk, nawk or awk.
+* Big Tech Bad
+* "Those who don't understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
+* My paranoia won't be satiated until I'm running my own physical server with
+a UPS
+
+## What next?
+* GUI git frontend using [stagit](https://git.codemadness.org/stagit/log.html)
+* Possible implementation of Markdown
+* Dedicated physical server at some point