Site Credits

This site runs with the help of a lot of good stuff.

The WordPress Stack

The site runs on the WordPress stack, with a minimal assortment of components, all of which are free and open source:

  1. The Kon-Tiki theme, which has been developed by me as a barebones albeit powerful and fully responsive theme with no JS
  2. A few key plugins:
    1. A custom plugin called Xylo, based on SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – used for highlighting code sections
    2. Disable Gutenberg – helps clean up all the mess and bloat that Gutenberg leaves behind, even on pages where it is not used.
    3. A few generic plugins such as Akismet and WP Cerber.

    The site also features Photonic, a gallery plugin, which I offer via the WP repository, but the site mainly hosts documentation for the plugin and its core is not powered by it.

Hosting

I use DreamHost VPS (Basic) for hosting, on a stack that is shared with 9 other sites. Most of my sites use either the Kon-Tiki theme (and its child themes).

I have been on DreamHost since 2005. I switched from ICDSoft, which, back then, was unparalleled for hosting single sites. Unfortunately, at least as things stood then, ICDSoft would tend to become quite expensive if I were to run it for the 10 sites that I own currently.

My Development Stack

PHPStorm

I have been using PHPStorm since quite a few years now. I was a Java developer at the turn of the millennium when I finished my Bachelor’s as a Computer Scientist and Engineer. My tool of choice for development at that time was Emacs – something that I still like! However, as a professional, someone introduced me to IDEA, or IntelliJ IDEA, as JetBrains’ only product (a Java IDE) was known, and it blew me away. Never had a tool been so compellingly good that I didn’t feel a pang of nostalgia when I gave up my first love (Emacs) for it.

When I picked up web development as a hobby in 2004, I started looking for a PHP editor. Eclipse was free and was used to build Aptana Studio – the editor of choice those days. Somehow Eclipse never grew on me the way IntelliJ did, though I continued using it for small stuff. So finally, when JetBrains came up with WebStorm / PHPStorm in 2009, I pounced on it hungrily. As I have been an Open Source developer since 2009, I have always been able to procure an Open Source license for PHPStorm.

WAMP

I originally used to run my own installations of Apache, MySQL and PHP. This was always a pain if I had to switch between different versions of PHP. Eventually I switched to WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) in around 2012 – this has been a great change, as it helps me manage my development environment a lot more easily. For folks on other operating systems, there is LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and MAMP (MacOS-Apache-MySQL-PHP).

Git Server on a Synology NAS

I use a Synology NAS for multiple things, primary being running a Plex server from home. I put my local codebase on it so that I would have some sort of version control from my development environment.