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Great news! Dan and I are going full-time on Server Side Up! To celebrate this milestone, we've completely revamped our website and made the exciting decision to move away from WordPress. Let me walk you through our journey and the technical decisions that led us here.
Why We Chose Nuxt Content
When selecting our next content management system, we had several key requirements:
- Free and open source
- Fast and flexible
- Self-hostable
- Excellent developer experience
After careful consideration, we settled on Nuxt Content, a git-based CMS that perfectly aligns with our needs. This choice has given us the flexibility and performance we were looking for while maintaining full control over our content.
Our Development Environment
As many of you know, I'm a strong advocate for development environments that exactly mirror production. To achieve this, we containerized everything using Spin, our own open source project that's built on top of Docker. This approach ensures consistency across all environments and allows us to self-host our Nuxt site without requiring a third party.
Self-Hosting: Our Approach
You might be thinking, "Surely you're deploying to Vercel since you're using JavaScript?" Not at all! This is the server that you're reading this from (no joke). It's my old gaming rig from 2019 😆
We're proudly self-hosting the site in my basement using:
- Proxmox
- Ubuntu
- Self-hosted GitLab
- Spin (Docker Swarm)
We're getting zero-downtime deployments with this stack, so it's really easy for us to keep pushing commits.
Our server setup is intentionally modest:
- 1 core (AMD Ryzen 2700)
- 1 GB RAM
- 35 mbps upload connection 🙃
- Dynamic WAN IP address 🤠
Despite these humble specifications, the site performs exceptionally well. We've achieved this by leveraging CloudFlare's free CDN, which helps us deliver content quickly to users worldwide.
I'll share more about this in a future blog post.
The Migration Process
Content migration was our biggest concern when planning this transition. Fortunately, we discovered the excellent wordpress-export-to-markdown project, which made the initial conversion process much smoother. While we still needed to adjust the front matter to match our new structure, AI tools helped us streamline this process significantly.
Quality Assurance
Testing was a crucial phase of our development process. We relied heavily on our other project called Bugflow for tracking issues and gathering feedback. This tool helped us crush bugs and improve the site through multiple rounds of QA.
Looking Forward to the Future
This website relaunch represents just the beginning of our journey. After several months of focused development, we're excited to have a platform that allows us to share our knowledge without any technical friction. We're looking forward to bringing you more content, tutorials, and insights about our experiences in web development and system administration.
Stay tuned for more updates, including exciting news about Spin + Nuxt integration and upcoming Bugflow features. We'd love to hear your feedback on our new platform!
Check out our new "Subscribe" page for the latest updates →
✌️ - Jay
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