saturn town

uses

for writing code, i use Sublime Text 4. this is not free software, but does have an indefinite evaluation period (the idea is that you buy a license eventually). it’s sort of fallen out of vogue now, but it still holds up as a robust, lightweight editor with some unintrusive IDE features such as build systems etc. for those typescript and node-heads out there.

saturn.town is written with Jekyll, a static-site generator written in ruby. i use ruby a decent amount in my day job, so it just feels comfy, even after trying the other offerings.

despite being a static site, i am hosting on a DigitalOcean VPS with a handful of my other sites. this allows me to have more control over the tooling i use vs. shared hosting. nginx acts as the main web server, and i use mariadb or sqlite for other projects with databases. other projects are utilizing php or ruby on rails. i believe it’s Ubuntu 23.04, but i don’t remember for sure. definitely debian-based.

for accessing my VPS, good-old-fashioned SSH is the ticket. if i want to transfer files, i use lftp, which has become indispensible. git for version control; currently, the remote is Github; i’m looking to move this in the medium-term future. as such, i’m not using any github action-based automation: i simply commit to the master branch, remote into the VPS, then execute the jekyll build process.

graphic work is done in Aseprite (hopefully) or GNU Image Manipulation Program (reluctantly). i would like to do more visual/image-based work on the web, but i tend to let the stylesheet do most of the visuals on my projects for reasons of time and ability.