Cleaning out my digital closet

Who could have foreseen that the inaugural stride toward a fresh dispatch should commence with the absurd realization that I am presently staring into the luminous void of VS Code, solely for the purpose of striking keys? It feels, if one is entirely honest with oneself, rather perverse to employ a magnificent and sprawling development environment as a glorified typewriter. Yet here we find ourselves.

Since migrating my non-tech gazette away from WordPress and into the minimalist domain of Grav, I harbored visions that the pure, unadorned simplicity of Markdown would coax my pen from its slumber. Yet, the native web interface of Grav proved remarkably adept at feeling entirely foreign, like a borrowed coat that sits crooked upon the shoulders and yet only covering half of the arm. The saddening result of this friction is that I am presently shattering all previous years’ literary output by sheer inertia alone. And yet, it functions: I sit here, composing prose, finding once more a genuine appetite for recording one’s private reflections and putting them in order.

Speaking of migrations and the shedding of digital dead weight: I venture to say that by now, even the most isolated souls dwelling in the deepest parliamentary archives have caught wind of PHP and its perennial catalogue of vulnerabilities - even the daily tabloids or gutter press took it upon themselves to announce the impending digital apocalypse, coloring it in the brightest colors doom and gloom offers to the bystander.

Having spent recent days diligently sweeping away superfluous machinery - yes, consigning my bespoke pastebin and kindred nonsense to the great bit-bucket in the sky - a goodly portion of my remaining services now reside exclusively behind the walls, accessible only via a private tunnel. This administrative sanctuary does not, alas, absolve me of the tedious duty of updates, but it drains the venomous urgency straight from the docket. Suddenly, their priority shifts gracefully from “existential emergency” down to “after a modest cup of tea,” or perhaps simply “tomorrow,” sparing my remaining hairs from turning yet completely grey.

To perpetually scamper in the wake of every newly discovered breach has, over these past few years, proved a most wearisome exercise, prompting the retrospective inquiry: What on earth possessed me, back in the dim dawn of time, to proxy everything directly through the publicly-facing Nginx?

The unvarnished truth - an admission I would scarce utter while in full possession of my sober faculties - is delightfully pedestrian: the virtual private networking tools of that era were an unmitigated disaster, and it was vastly simpler to fling the machinery straight into the teeth of the internet and hope for the best - wishing it good luck and drown the fear in patching the very next disaster on that overflowing list.

In the final reckoning, it is a curious spectacle how a few modest infrastructural realignments not only spare the cycles of the server rack, but work a profound and immediate improvement upon one’s own disposition. When the ceaseless, phantom howling of the background noise is finally banished, there remains once more a quiet, uncluttered chamber for the matter at hand: the simple, unblemished pleasure of watching the engines perform precisely what they were bidden to do. And a nice cup of tea.