Part of the “Behind the Scenes” series

Due to real life blockers, work load and various other reasons. We took a bit of a break with creating content for HackYour.Tech. Now that things with work have gotten back to a consistent “normal” for the both of us, we discussed some changes we have implemented (are implementing) for this project. These changes align more with our original goals and view of HackYour.Tech as well as aligns closer to our actual work and ever-growing experience.

Our Previous Choices

Initially, we designed and launched HackYour.Tech to be a cybsecurity focused blog that offers content for all types of viewers, and hopefully helps companies with initial security concerns and steps – regardless of their buget or resources. Our previous project was impacted by scope creep as well as our ability to be easily nerd sniped by interesting topics! We spent a lot of time building out automated dashboards and honeypots to attempt to monitor and gather realtime data from attackers. As fun as this was, it fell out of scope of what we originally wanted to do – and we realised we were completely forgetting our original goals. This, accompanied with job changes and life blockers, ultimately lead to a period of burnout.

Our Fresh Start… WordPress

In order to ensure we focus on this blog and the content, we have decided to migrate from using a static site built with Hugo over to this new website in WordPress. As WordPress contains, and continuously grows, a plethora of functionality, themes and plugins, this should massively reduce our overhead and time requirements to get features we want up and running.

We have opted for deploying our own instance of WordPress onto a VPS, rather than use a one-click host. Ideally we still want to control the underlying tech stack, but utilising the power of WordPress seems a no brainer considering the previous blockers we hit when building functionality within our Hugo site. Note; this was not a Hugo issue. This was mostly down to skill issue.

I’m sure some of your reading will be against WordPress, where as others will be for it. But after discussions, we figured that this platform ticks enough boxes we want and allows us to focus more on the content and projects we want to work on! As part of this migration, we will be documenting our deployment steps and choices, as well as create some content around hardening a WordPress blog itself. This is a dynamic process, and will most likely be a living document that we refer too, so with any luck, small businesses who are starting out with WordPress might stumble across it and gain some value from the read!

Introducing HackYour.Tech “Guests”

Our next step towards our original goals is to introduce guest writers and content creators to help increase our content and security value for all readers and viewers. We have met some great people and made some very good friends during both our journeys in tech, and following discussions with them, we have all agreed to start posting content on HackYour.Tech together. As these guests are onboarded, they will be creating and releasing content under their own WordPress accounts (one huge benefit for us using a CMS here), with the topics revolving around their own profession and position in the industry. Their bios will appear on the ‘About’ page as. and when, they begin posting!

So far, we have confirmed two guest posters who will be joining us. One is a pentester with a generalised focus across all things pentesting. The second is a defender who is currently working in a SoC, helping defend a large client based and all underlying infrastructure. These different disciplines will increase our scope of content and posts, as well as introduced a wider range of expertise and experience.