This site and how it works

Jan 7, 2018

A bit about how this site works, since that seems like an appropriate first post. This site has been around since 2014, when I acquired the domain, but I haven’t done anything with it besides having a basic website here until making this post in 2018. Seems like a long time to not have an actual site, but I wanted to keep the domain (it’s so short!), and it’s useful to have a domain for adding custom DNS things when needed. This site’s content is all open source and viewable on GitHub at jvperrin/jvperrin.github.io.

Anyway, onto the site’s actual workings. It uses GitHub Pages with Jekyll, like many other sites out there. This works amazingly for mostly static content, like this site. This site uses Cloudflare for SSL to help keep your browsing secure (and fast!), and even redirects from HTTP to HTTPS using Cloudflare’s Page Rules to enforce redirecting http://*jvp.io/* to use HTTPS even if someone visits the site via HTTP at first.

Unfortunately, since this site uses GitHub Pages with a custom domain, it lacks IPv6 support, but I’d love to add it when it becomes available for custom domains.

Another drawback of using GitHub pages is that it doesn’t have SSL for custom domains, so the connection between you and my website here is not fully encrypted. Only the first connection between you and Cloudflare is encrypted, the connection between Cloudflare’s SSL terminators and GitHub is unencrypted, but this site is entirely static anyway, so I don’t think that really matters that much. Still, I’d definitely prefer it if everything was SSL, so I’ll keep an eye out for any updates on the situation.

As for the site’s front-end workings, it uses One-Nexus, which I think is an underappreciated project to create nice looking interfaces, both on your computer and phone. It’s also quite easy to set up for static websites and uses Sass, so that’s a bit nicer when developing with it.

Let me know if you have any questions!