On Mother’s day I realized my email had stopped working. Looking into it, my hosting provider had disappeared, which stopped all DNS (including MX) and web sites from working.

I had some advanced notice that this was going to happen, but spending time on transitioning kept moving to the bottom of my TODO list.  I ended up setting up with DigitalOcean as a provider (starting at $5/month for a reasonable Linux server) and copied my site content over.

I spent some time experimenting with the Ghost blogging platform.  Ghost’s focus is on content delivery just as a blog, not as a CMS.  I’ve had my share of struggled with WordPress before, so I decided to give Ghost a shot.

Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform

Ghost uses Node.js for serving up server-side JavaScript code.  It was cool to spend some time learning about how to setup Node.js servers, how to maintain them and serve content efficiently, but in the end I realized that I need a CMS, not just a blogging platform.  Thus, I’m back with WordPress.

Thanks to all the people at the SANS Security West 2014 conference this week taking the SEC575, SEC617, and SEC660 classes, who patiently waited for me to get my site back up and running so they could grab tools, papers, and presentations from my site.  If you see anything broken, please let me know.

Thanks! -Josh