A few months ago, I received an e-mail from my hosting provider that there was a potential security leak in mooses.nl. It had been a while since I last updated it, so I honestly completely forgot what software I actually used to host my website. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say...
Turns out I was using some outdated version of Joomla on my webhost's managed PHP5.3 installation. I guess my hosting provider did a simple trawl of installed software (they had installatron installed on there) and realized that I was running an exploitable version of Joomla.
Since I don't like leaving security leaks open, I figured I'd have to do something about it. Effectively, I had a few options:
- Take everything down and just forget about mooses.nl. This wasn't desirable, since mooses.nl is actually used for a few projects I've been working on, and over the years I've linked to certain binaries (most notably Noctis IV binaries) on random forums. I'd hate to see those links 404 on people, especially if they were actually interested in some of the stuff I have to offer (woo! people still play Noctis?)
- Upgrade Joomla to a version that's not insecure, potentially delaying the inevitable pwning of mooses.nl
- Ditch Joomla and use some other PHP-based thing, perhaps write my own simple CMS.
- Ditch PHP and use a static site generator.
Needless to say, I went for #4. Static site generators have been quite the thing of the past few years, partially because of Markdown gaining traction almost everywhere on the Internet (which significantly decreases the adoption hurdle). I actually wrote my own static site generator a while ago in NodeJS, but after reviewing my own code I decided to use something else instead. I had used Jekyll in the past, but I wasn't terribly fond of that either, so I had to use something else...
So here it is, mooses.nl v4, based on Pelican and hosted on a droplet I'm running on DigitalOcean (AMS-2, for those interested). Currently, I'm using Vincent-C's pelican-svbhack theme, which is very neat, but I'm probably going to fork that theme since I'd like to make my own subtle changes to the layout.