a status page/account for murkworks.net?

[solarbird]

Now that we have substantially more users than just ourselves again – this was a thing back in the day, we had a peak of like 40 users – we kind of need a status page so we can warn people about nontrivial shit or that we’re going offline for some reason like losing power.

So:

1. Our mail server already has web services on it for list management
2. Add a local wordpress instance there, which means it’s not on the main web or mastodon servers
3. Federate that with an address something like at status at status dot murkworks dot net)
4. Have the mastodon.murkworks.net librarian account follow it
5. Have posts to it also go to the various mailing lists we host so they know directly

Which means:

1. If our mastodon server goes down, people could check status dot murkworks dot net and see the wordpress version
2. If the main web server goes down that wouldn’t affect status
3. If status itself needs to go down, since it’ll be federated and followed (by the librarian) on mastodon.murkworks.net, people can check the status account there to see what was last posted, which – if we take it down in a controlled manner for things like a major upgrade – they would still be able see, and therefore, they could read the last status message
4. If anyone not on our instance follows the status user (and I would ask someone to do that for this purpose) then people would be able to do the same thing checking on that system’s server. I think. (As would anyone following it themselves of course.)

This is me using caching to bridge downtime to keep status information available under as many circumstances as possible, basically.

(Well, without having to hire some sort of off-site hosting which we can’t afford right now anyway or using some rando account someplace which is kind of what we’ve been doing and which I’d prefer not to do.)

It’s the “federated wordpress blog” part that makes this viable.

Am I missing anything important?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.