Re-Baseline⚓︎

Ever since I can remember, I've always had an interest in tech. This interest has evolved over the years and has taken me pretty far, all things considering. I remember being around 15 years old and building my first computer in my parents basement. It was the first time of many that I would be doing such a thing. Nowadays, building a computer isn't nearly as straightforward, but that's not really the point of this article.

The reason I bring this up is because I've gotten to a point where my systems are so disorganized distributed that it's become hard to keep track of what's where.

Current State⚓︎

I started years ago with having a homelab, having more or less everything hosted locally. This worked for awhile, but eventually, it became annoying to manage every little thing. Not to mention, having a full time job and a kid leaves for little free time.

I began seeing the true potential of cloud hosting and took the plunge into hosting a large chunk of my services on DigitalOcean. This has served me incredibly well, and I still use it heavily to this day.

However, something that I started realizing is that I was getting locked in and didn't have the sort of flexibility that I wanted. This was particularly evident in my knowledge base, as well as this blog. This led me to a lengthy migration to migrate both into Markdown files. In the process, I blew up my implementation of Ghost, which was disappointing and also a bit freeing. One less thing tied to a MySQL database.

I now host this blog and my knowledge base on Cloudflare via their Pages service. It's honestly fantastic and makes things so much easier. I do miss writing in Ghost because I feel that their editor was just super slick. However, I've really gotten used to writing in VS Code, so I'm not too broken up about it.

Anyway, back on track.

At this point, my current state of things is basically as follows:

A quick side note is that the most up to date state of services & domains can be found here.

Future State⚓︎

As nice as this is to have everything either on DigitalOcean, Cloudflare or at home, there's still certain things I want to improve.

Domains⚓︎

Because I use Cloudflare so heavily, I'd like to have all my domains use the Cloudflare Registrar. The issue is that because the registrar is fairly new, it doesn't support all TLDs. This is problematic because I have three domains that have unsupported TLDs...

• dave.link
• eighty7.co
• davelevine.co

The eighty7.co domain is pretty heavily baked into things at this point because it's the domain used for email on nearly everything I've ever created an account for. More on that here.

The dave.link and davelevine.co domains are currently not really being utilized, which is kind of a shame since I really like them; I just don't have anything specifically to use them for at the moment. I'm still kicking around whether or not to let them go or hang onto them. For now, I'm hanging onto them, but we'll see where that goes.

I really need to consolidate some of these domains because truthfully, it's stupid to have so many. I've got a bit of time before a lot of them get close to expiration so I'll weigh the pros and cons of each, then make a decision.

Services⚓︎

It's easy to see that I have a lot of services that I maintain, but the reality is, some of them I always never use. They've always been more of a situation where it's nice to have when I need it, but that day hasn't really come yet. Some exist purely because I wanted to see if I could set them up. Others are just downright dated and don't serve a whole lot of purpose (looking at you, Netbox), but because I spent a ton of time setting them up, it feels like a waste to get rid of them.

Conclusion⚓︎

There's more that I can write on this, but I think it won't be long before I start repeating myself. I'll be spending a fair bit of time doing some consolidation in my free time when I can. I've already gotten off to a good start; now to keep the momentum going.