I’ve had a mysterious broken page on this site for a while - but been too busy to look into it. My Comprehensive Linux Backups with etckeeper & backupninja article has been refusing to load, and returning a weird HTTP 418 Unused status code instead. I finally made the time to figure out the cause.

It turned out that this was being caused by the Apache/PHP mod_security module. This is a static website - there’s no PHP anywhere - so why would that be a problem? Well, so far I’ve been very happily hosting the site on my old DreamHost shared hosting account - which comes with Apache & PHP installed whether you want it or not. At some point …

As I mentioned previously, this site was put together using Pelican - a static site generator, written in Python.

Static site generators take your content, pour it into your templates and output the result as static pre-generated HTML, CSS, JS & image files. You can then just upload the resulting folder of output to your server and you’re done. All you need on the server is a web server of some sort, like Apache or Nginx - anything really - all it’s doing is serving static pages.