zeul.ca

In 2021, I built my first personal website in PHP and hosted it on a fanless Raspberry Pi in my basement using Apache. The site includes a fully custom comment system backed by a file-based database using nested folders (blog/data/YYYY/M/D/). When bots started flooding comments, I added a lightweight math-based CAPTCHA to keep spam out while staying simple to use.

One early mistake: I wrote a massive 12-case switch statement for date formatting that spanned hundreds of lines. Later I realized PHP's built-in date_format() function could replace all of it with one line.

The site runs on PPPOE with a public IP and VLAN firewall rules. After outgrowing the Pi's reliability and bandwidth, I migrated to Oracle Cloud for better uptime. Since then, I've built several more sites using static generators like Material for MkDocs for cleaner docs and faster load times.