Ever since I saw Let’s Encrypt pop up on HN I’ve been pretty excited about it’s release. Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit slow setting it up as a week or two ago they hit 1,000,000 certificates issued… Finally, I’m ready though. There are a few guides out there about how to set it up but I haven’t found anything conclusive for setting it up with Server Pilot and Cloudflare. Probably the best of these for using Let’s Encrypt is the Digital Ocean one which I’ve based the below on, the main differences are that I’ve used a stronger DH Param, have a slightly different cipher list and have a few Serverpilot specific bits.

A couple of months ago I decided to move away from my Sails.js based blog. This wasn’t because I disliked sails or node but for me, it wasn’t the right tool. The node process on my server used around 50meg of RAM idling and while I believe this to be normal it made me a little uneasy. I did a test of a simple golang webserver and the memory footprint was under a meg; much better.

Recently I have been refining my static website creation workflow; here is a link to the repo. In short it is based off HTML5-boilerplate, uses gulp, includes purecss as a base, styling with less, templating with twig and uses plumber and notify for errors.

Up until recently I’ve been using git prompt for Windows to get myself a half decent terminal while at work. I also followed this to give it a little extra.

It’s been great. I’ve been able to use vi, ssh (without putty!) run Python & Ruby scripts sanely and of course, I’ve been able to have fun with piping.

I’ve had my MacBook for a bit over a year now and have only just got round to making a boot USB which works. I tried a few months ago but gave up after booting to BusyBox…

I decided to install Kali as it’s full of fun and useful programs (I’ve been asked a few times to reset passwords on laptops by forgetful friends and family). That being said this should work for most Linux distros.

I used sails.js to build my website and think it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for a decent, production ready web framework sitting on top of node.js (and express).

I’m not going to go into the details of why I think it’s good or how it differs from alternatives out there; there are many posts doing this already. Instead I’m going to talk about something I don’t really like - the default server side templating engine ejs.