Programming on davepedu.com

modernizing this blog

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My personal website has existed in some form since the late 2000s, and like many hobby projects, it has been rebuilt far more times than strictly necessary. My taste in tech stacks has changed over time, and each version reflects whatever I was experimenting with at the time.

These are some of thee iterations it has gone through over the years, and what is to come:

2011 - WordPress

Early 2012 - A single word to mark my existence on the Internet

Late 2012 - Cheesy wood paneling and filler text

Early 2013 - A fully custom Python blog engine

Late 2013 - Drupal 7 on a new .io domain

2014 - Design changes

2016 - More design changes

Aside - this list was actually a lot of fun to put together. I had forgotten entirely about some of these iterations.

Out of all of these, the Drupal 7 iteration lasted, by far, the longest. Which, itself, is amusing. Drupal is implemented in PHP, and there is a lot of writing on the internet about whether PHP is the greatest language or a terrible language. But either way, it is undeniable that PHP is like a cockroach that will not die.

But why Drupal, anyways? It bills itself as being for Enterprise, which usually means large and hulking codebases. And it is. When I set up this site using Drupal, I was working for the Rochester Institute of Technology, building the school’s own websites in Drupal. It was already familiar to me from this, so it was easy enough to use Drupal for my own purposes.

But, I eventually stopped working with Drupal and web development in general as I moved into other roles - which I wrote about here - and I didn’t keep up with Drupal or PHP’s evolution. Which, for Drupal, actually would have required some serious re-writes as the theme rendering layer was changed pretty drastically from version 7 to 8. But that’s probably more detail about Drupal than anyone needs.

PHP too, changed. My Drupal website was written to work with PHP 5, which hasn’t been supported for years. Server operating systems have long dropped support for it. Between it and Drupal’s age, it’s honestly a miracle the site never got hacked.

PHP evolved, Drupal evolved, became more complicated, and I did not keep up. So now it is time to build something new, and to keep it simple this time around.

This time, I’ve decided to use Hugo, which is a static website framework. In summary, you give it your content formatted in Markdown which it will organize and feed into a template, which then in turn outputs HTML.

This post, too, is a Markdown file that contains the text you see and some metadata at the top:

+++
title = "modernizing this blog"
date = "2026-03-14"
author = "Dave"
cover = "img/IMG_1053_cropped.jpg"
hideCoverInSingle = true
description = "This blog has been migrated to a static website, using Hugo!"
tags = ["Programming", "Meta"]
+++

I’ll lose a few things by switching to a simple static site. I could update the Drupal website from anywhere - just log in and write a new post, or save it as a draft. And the comment section - sorry, you’ll have to write to me directly now.

I’m also switching to my original davepedu.com domain, instead of dpedu.io. The .io domain was trendy at some point in the past, and I’ve come to think that a classic .com is better anyway. On top of that, it allows me to keep the old Drupal site online at dpedu.io while I manually extract content from Drupal and re-write it for Hugo. After a time, that domain will redirect here as well. The old site didn’t have terribly much content, but I’m also going through unpublished drafts and making them into real posts.

The new hosting stack will be similar, too. Before, I had a bare-metal dedicated server rented from OVH. I went with dedicated servers since at the time I was working on computer infrastructure. Another big complex thing I don’t want to take care of anymore, hah. I’ll be sticking with OVH, but I’ll be using a VPS instead. A VPS is a good middle ground - over something completely hands-off like static hosting on Cloudflare - because it still gives me a place to play sysadmin, which I enjoy. And everything configured on it will be installed with a simple form of configuration management - but more on that in a future post.

Of course, I couldn’t resist adding a bit of engineering fun.

I’ve written a Go-based application that acts like a toy version of AWS’s S3 static website hosting. It’s called s3static, and is meant to be used with S3-compatible storage systems such as Minio or RustFS. But more about that project in its own dedicated post.

Traefik will also be involved. It’s meant for Kubernetes but works great with a text config file too. It also automatically handles TLS certificates via Let’s Encrypt, for which I used an unusual and convoluted process, which is a whole other story.

Hopefully, keeping things simple will help this version stick around. Either way, rebuilding the site has been a fun excuse to revisit old memories, clean things up, and experiment with a few new tools.

davepedu.com chief technology officer

RIT Project Lead The Way Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A website Project Lead The Way Website, where the Rochester Institute of Technology serves as New York State’s National Affiliate.

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT University Arenas Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A massive Drupal website, that took us nearly two months to design and develop! It’s fully responsive, has some great animation and attention to detail, and a good number of photos from previous events at RIT.

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT Board of Trustees Intranet Portal

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The RIT Board of Trustees Intranet Portal is a CodeIgniter based web application that I designed and developed. It is an intranet website that is used to disseminate meeting materials for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Board of Trustees meetings, as well as poll its members for attendance, feedback, etc.

Code from this project was re-used for another project, the RIT President’s Roundtable, an advisory committee for the President of RIT.

RIT Center for Urban Entrepreneurship Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Another beautiful Drupal website, this time for RIT’s Center for Urban Entrepreneurship in downtown Rochester.

This one was designed in-house at RIT Production Services, with a nice Responsive theme for mobile phones and tablets as well.

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT KGCOE Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This was actually a project I completed about a year prior, but we decided to revisit it to update the site and add responsive design features - try the site on a smartphone, it’s excellent!

The layout was designed in house and I did 100% of the development work. The old layout dated back to 2002, so it was obvious this site needed a refresh! It’s amazing how much different the web looks, now.

The KGCOE website was the first of a new family of websites - or a group of websites with a similar look and feel. The layout was adapted for several more Engineering websites at RIT, including Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. These sites also share some content - Staff and facility listings, for example - and that was interesting to put together.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the site came out, and working with the school’s Engineering department was great!

Additionally, this website won a Silver Award, given by The w3 Awards in its Best of the Web competition.

The new College of Engineering website was honored for its homepage design, the structure and navigation of the site as well as its visual appeal. Undergoing a complete redesign in the past academic year, the site incorporates multiple carousel images and stories of student and faculty work, separate informational sections for prospective students and corporate partners, testimonials as well as in-depth information about majors and programs offered in the college. Contributors for the site include: Bhalla; Bastian; David Pedu, Web programmer; and Karen Ester, communications specialist in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering.

Two of our Web projects were recognized by W3 last year, so it is great to get continued recognition from them this year as well. It’s a testament to the immense talent that we have internally at RIT,” said Raman Bhalla, assistant director, Web/IT services.

- RIT News

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT Innovative Learning Institute Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Innovative Learning Institute at RIT is a new department, under the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies branch. The layout is very similar to the CMS website, and was also designed by Dumbwaiter Design.

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT Center for Multidisciplinary Studies Website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The CMS Website was created for RIT’s Center for Multidisciplenary Studies, and was graphically designed by Dumbwaiter Design and developed by myself. It’s based on Drupal to allow the CMS staff to easily create and post content to the website.

This project was a new challenge - typically, all of our designs were created in-house. Which is very convenient, if I need anything changed or clarification it’s a 10 second walk to talk to the designer. But, working with the CMS staff and Dumbwaiter Design went absolutely great!

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.

RIT Wildenhain Exhibition website

dave@davepedu.com (dave) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A website showcasing the work of mid century artist Frans Wildenhain, built on WordPress. Features a prominent art photo gallery, and a WordPress blog.

Additionally, this website won a Silver Award, given by The w3 Awards in its Best of the Web competition.

The Frans Wildenhain Exhibition website was designed to feature the fall 2012 exhibition of mid-century modern pottery by Bauhaus-trained ceramist Frans Wildenhain.

“The site had to be designed to attract and hold the diverse interests of an international audience,” says Bruce Austin, professor of communication. “The efforts of the Web/IT team led to a website every bit as innovative, exciting and dynamic as the art on exhibit."

“These awards are a testament to the talented staff we have here at RIT,”" says Raman Bhalla, assistant director for Web/IT services. In addition to Bhalla, the Web/IT team includes Megan Bastian, Harry Groover, Gage LaFleur, Elizabeth Lamark, David Pedu and Dan Roder.

- RIT News

This website has since been decommissioned and replaced with an updated design, but my work may still be viewed via archive.org.