sciolism

Costs to run this blog

I happily noticed that the number of (self-hosted) blogs I came across has increased recently. The latter ones feature some posts where people did a break down of the monthly costs for their blog. Great idea, let’s see what this means for sciolism.

Hosting & Domain

This blog runs on a small VPS hosted by DigitalOcean. The monthly costs are about $6. The domain is about 9€ per year with DNS being managed via DigitalOcean. The certificates for encryption are provided by Let’s Encrypt and are free of charge.

Software

As every blog or website this blog heavily relies on software. First of all there is the CMS or in this case the static site generator hugo which is free of charge. The webserver on the VPS is a nginx instance - free of charge, too. Other software like a FTP clients, text or graphic editors can hardly be attributed since they are used for multiple purposes.

Wrap up

In total the monthly costs are about 6-7€ which is absolutely ok and underlines that self-hosting is affordable. I think it is important to point out that the costs would be much higher with all components being charged, so it is a good opportunity for a big shout-out to the many (open-source) projects that help to run this blog.

ten.fifteen: Catalina

A couple of days after the release of macOS 10.15.2 I decided to upgrade my primary working machine to macOS Catalina. While I could find a lot of evidence on several Apple related websites that the upgrade caused issues for many users, a dry run on a testing system made me rather optimistic that the upgrade will run smoothly for me. However, after upgrading I stumbled across two issues which I had to resolve.

WordCamp Düsseldorf 2019

During a recent WordPress Meetup in Düsseldorf I decided to try out a new way to support the WordPress community by participating in the organization of the upcoming WordCamp Düsseldorf. With respect to the experience made during the WordCamp Cologne 2015 I can highly recommend to grab a ticket and join the conference to anyone of you being interested in WordPress.

e.nigma 2015 1.2

As recently promised I just pushed an update for the e.nigma 2015 theme. The release notes are rather short but contain two important improvements:

* Enhanced experience on mobile devices (theme is "mobile friendly" now)
* Improved compatibility with recent WordPress versions

Since the theme was not updated for roughly four years a couple of minor adjustment were necessary to guarantee compatibility with recent WordPress versions. However, more attention should be given to the improvements with respect to the mobile experience. I made several adjustments to improve the mobile experience of the theme. More ❤️ for 📱.