web server update

[Dirk Hohndel]

Hi everyone

About a week ago I quietly switched our web server over to something that looks familiar, but is actually completely different from what we had before.
It still looks like a WordPress site. And still gets several hundred hacking attempts a day.
Except it no longer IS a WordPress site. It's a static set of web pages that are almost entirely automatically created from a WordPress site that sits on a server in my house that is only accessible from within my home network.
Which means I didn't have to worry about creating a new design or things suddenly being completely different.
But while that is still a WordPress site, it also isn't the WordPress site that we had before (that has been turned off). Instead it's a site that is created by a hand full of scripts based on raw text files which then insert posts and pages into a MySQL database which backs the new WordPress site. Which means that I no longer have to fight with the idiotic and constantly changing WordPress UI and the constant rat race of having to update one component which breaks another component, the update to which breaks... you get the idea.
As a result all I worry about are text files with posts and some leftover crap from it being WordPress during an intermediate step. Updates SHOULD be simple and fairly easy to publish. And I no longer have to worry about the MySQL server going down, someone hacking my server using yet another WordPress bug (this has happened three times in the years I ran the Subsurface website) and overall the resource need for the server has gone down DRAMATICALLY. Which will reduce my hosting cost (which the past couple of years had become quite substantial.

I'll push a few changes to the Subsurface code today that will decouple the update check backend from the web server (right now they share the same host name - which of course I'll need to keep viable for quite a while longer). And I'll also need to start thinking about the changing SSL certificates (as the one we use for the cloud service is hard coded in our sources and that one expires later this year).

So expect more infrastructure work from me - but I'll also try to find time to work on PRs and stuff

/D

PS: did anyone notice that the web server changed? Did anyone notice that literally dozens of posts disappeared (because the only accesses to those posts in the last 9 months had been from spiders and bots)?
PPS: did I break anything that is actually useful? I tried really hard to make sure that the weird way the translations work is still supported and in my testing the new server and old server appear to work the same, but if I broke something useful, please let me know so I can take a look