This blog runs on the WordPress platform, using a slightly tweaked version of the Freak Pro theme from Inkhive. Why slightly tweaked? The text was too light for my taste, and the links not obvious enough and the photo captions not really distinct from the rest of the text. So I fixed the CSS.

I’ve installed the software on an AWS EC2 t3.small instance in us-west-2 (Oregon) which has the LAMP stack installed on Amazon Linux 2, substituting MariaDB in place of MySQL. It shares the instance and associated storage with my Reluctant Adventurer blog and my brother’s teaching blog Flash the Grammar Cat (Flash, as it so happens, lives with me, but he teaches English in Uruguay.)

To handle SSL/TLS, I installed the “Let’s Encrypt” Certbot, that will renew my certificates on a regular basis. Of course, I also set up the site to always redirect to the “https” protocol no matter what you type. So you’ll always have that nice lock on the top of the screen telling you you’re safe.

For storage, I created and mounted standalone EBS volumes for the media content (photos) and the database files rather than having my content stored on the root volume. That will allow me to easily bring the site up on a different host fairly quickly should that be necessary. Both volumes are regularly backed up to S3, of course.