All new site (again)

So, looking back at the last post date, 2017, and 2015 before that, lets shed some light into the site. Things have progressed albeit slowly.

I’ve been busy with all kinds of things, hence why I mostly kept the radio “working as it is”. However, the site now runs new software. Both the “site” as well as the “radio” part. This will improve stability and performance. In fact quite a lot has changed.

First of all, I’ve embraced Kubernetes. TouHou.FM is not the only thing being ran on my server and I noticed that the shift to Kubernetes isn’t actually that bad. This has also changed my view on Docker and containers. I tried to containerize the radio in the past. I decided to drop the idea back then and go back to running it as native OS packages. However, after playing about with Kubernetes and noticing how easy it makes to manage infrastructure, scaling and also upgrading, a/b testing, I was sold. So over the next couple of months, I will be migrating nearly everything to containers, including the radio.

And the start of that is by tackling the site and putting this on a Docker. In fact, not only is it going on Docker, the site is also moving away from the old CMS. While Concrete5 is in fact very nice, I’m not so fond of PHP these days anymore. In fact, I want to move to mostly static sites for now as far as they can. So the new site will serve most content statically. This should mean that there will be no break-ins possible which would allowing hosting of arbitrary data and effectively turn to a spam host. Now, truly static it won’t be, because there is some data inherently non-static. These will be accessible through a separate API which JavaScript will be interacting with. This means that song ratings, playlist overview and song requests would become a possibility again. Also creating an API server is easier in efficient languages. So the new site will be part static, and start API driven to fetch the dynamic parts later.