A small tech success - 14th September 2026

The Relevant Tech Challenge: nginx and certbot

The title is slightly misleading, there’s three relevant technical challenges:

• nginx configuration: I’m planning to run several virtual hosts, so this is a relatively difficult configuration; especially working through defaults configurations or online suggestions of “similar but different” setups.
• certbot integration: in 2026 everything needs a valid SSL certificate just to work with contemporary browsers, so I’m using certbot to do that.
• running concurrent projects: whenever I come back to this project I have to relearn its state before taking on the latest issue.

As discussed, this is all part of “working in public”, and also to remind myself how far I’ve come while the actual game isn’t running yet. Also it means that anyone following the project can forewarn me if I’ve made any especially bad choices.

Success

I made nginx work in a way that means certbot challenges work, and standard access to mailman works too.

The Perplexity LLM was helpful here, I’m using it as a kind of advanced search, asking what to do about specific problems or errors, or asking it to inspect files. I mean I could probably get the same level of help from an online forum or sub-reddit, but LLMs are far quicker, far more helpful, and far less snarky, you just have to think through their advice.

Next…

• Decide whether to integrate mailman authentication with Authelia before doing anything else with mailman.
• Actually get mailman working.
• Decide if I’m using mailman for those who want notifications when the game is live, or whether that’s for an external mailing list provider like Buttondown.