Now that I have created a platform and written my first post I thought I’d describe how I go about adding new posts.

At the moment I ssh into the F3RR3T backend, compose the post, and then use the jekyll command

jekyll build --watch &

to build the site. The --watch argument keeps the jekyll ‘daemon’ alive, watching for further changes to files and rebuilding them instantly without further instruction from me. The & releases the process to operate in the background so that I can regain access to the console’s command prompt.

This is quite a cumbersome way to operate. I am at the mercy of my LAN connection, which can be tenuous when I am using a laptop at the other end of the house. But worse, I have to contend with the slow and lag-ridden ADSL that masquaredes under the name ‘broadband’, here in the national capital of a rich, technologically-advanced country.

But hey, life’s too short to rant (all the time). My reality is that during peak times, like weeknights, I can count to ten while waiting for a key press to register on the screen. I need a better way, and I think I’ve come up with a solution that will also create a local backup of my static site. Two birds with one stone. I’ll write about that when it happens.

Adding a third layer

I love a complicated solution. And this is the real reason for writing this post. My laptop runs Windows 10. When I bought it, I considered lots of options (which I might lay out in another post), but what I settled on was a reasonably powerful tablet/laptop, with enough CPU power and RAM to run a virtual machine. In this virtual machine, I set up a basic Arch Linux system, which really only needs to run a terminal and access my dropbox folder that sits on the Windows host. I can use the win10 web browser and ssh to F3RR3T from the VM. That’s my third layer. It makes me smile to think that I can overcome the paucity of tools in Windows so easily and neatly, without the host ever suspecting what is occuring inside it.