What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I read this blog:
https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/

about do-nothing-scripts to gradually automate repetetive tasks and I find the approach makes a lot of sense. It provides good documentation and can mix both manual and cleanly automated steps. Ansible et al. might be a better approach longterm if tou have a larger team working on many different things, but to me it seems overkill for a side project (unless you are already comfortable with it or just want to learn it).

As for deploying code, most continous integration systems have a bunch of plugins for this kind of thing. It is kind of dependnet on your infrastructure. I'm sure e.g. github actions could be used to trigger a deploy.

useradd --system <account name> seems to be the way to go when adding the service accounts. Creating these could go into your do-nothing-script :)

Some two cents on 1. and 2.:

1. I'd say the learning curve is on the shallower side for stuff like installing packages and creating directories and users. Setup required is minimal: no need to run any agents on the remote servers, just be able to SSH in and have Python installed. The official reference for the builtin modules lists lots of configurable parameters for each module, but you can probably get by with just looking up a handful that's needed to do what you want.
2. You need something that triggers the automatic deployment, and something that carries out the deployment. For the trigger, GitHub Actions would also be what I'd reach for. For the deployment process itself, Fabric is a nice abstraction for working with remote servers. It gives you primitives for connecting to a remote server (or a group of them), running commands on them, and/or transferring files to them, and so on. Looks like there are GitHub repos that use this combo of GitHub Actions and Fabric :D
   • Going a step further, creating separate directories for each version of the code and symlinking to the latest one will give clean separation of versions and easy rollback - Capistrano-style as some may call it. (The linked repo is a bit old. May or may not work with the latest version of Fabric.)

BCHS sounds like a good place to start. Just substitute your own components. Python's cgi server is really convenient, so HTML, SQLite, Python is a good starting point. Plus, Python might make it easier to transition off of cgi and into more modern practices down the road.

LAMP stack still works fine, especially for a small, homemade news aggregator! My advice would be to start building off the existing skills you know, and progressively add in new tools that interest you.

The easiest next step from basic LAMP to a more modern setup would be moving from inline PHP to Laravel for the interactive portions of your site. If frontend seems like your thing, you can try out Tailwind, React, or even build up a solid base of vanilla JS knowledge.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for a more all-in-one, gold standard, greenfield solution and don’t mind ditching PHP, Python’s Django framework is known for having really good documentation and a solid developer experience (though expect a several week learning curve). Like Laravel, it’s the sort of tool that will stick around for the next twenty years, and learning Python will probably give you greater ROI when it comes to day-to-day computing activities than will PHP.