Ottmar Klaas

This is the second blog post in a two part series describing my journey through the myriads of web-hosting options to find the one that is right for me. The first part described how the software stack I had in mind influenced the hosting choices I was considering. With a little bias toward a solution that is fun, I ended up with a VPS (virtual private server) as my choice of hosting platform. Go check out part one for more detail, or continue to read if you want to know what lead me to sign up with RamNode as my VPS provider of choice.

If you read my first blog post, you know how I ended up with GRAV to build this website. As a next step, you might expect me to follow up with a blog post about the design and coding of this website. But, eager to disappoint, I will skip right over that. Not without a good reason, though. There are so many tutorials for HTML and CSS available online that I can’t add any value to what is already there.
Instead, I’m going to point you at this video (fast forward to the 12:25-minute mark). It was the starting point that led me to the software stack described on the about page. From there it is fairly easy to follow the GRAV documentation to set up a theme for a website.

Data breaches that compromise personal accounts have become a frequent occurrence. I was an involuntary participant in such an event in October 2013 when Adobe got hacked. Despite the fact that Adobe stored the passwords encrypted, there is no guarantee that the hackers were not able to retrieve the plain text passwords. With specialized computers a brute force attach can crack an eight character password within a few hours. And that assumes the password is random gibberish and not among the most commonly used passwords. As passwords are often reused, a cracked password opens the doors for the hackers to try to access other accounts as well.^[1]

If you start a new blog, and one of the reasons you do so is to capture and catalog interesting things you spent a good chunk of your time on, it seems appropriate to start by describing how the blog came about, and how it was all put together from a technical point of view.