About this Site
Why This Site Exists
SohoLab started because the home-lab outgrew casual notes. What began as a single file server has evolved over the years into a multi-host virtualisation environment with its own firewall, storage infrastructure, PKI, and internal services. At some point, keeping track of what was built, why, and how stopped being optional.
The articles here are written for practitioners — people who run their own infrastructure at home or in small environments and want to read about real decisions made on real systems, not sanitised vendor tutorials. The tone is analytical, occasionally opinionated, and grounded in roughly three decades of professional IT experience.
SohoLab is a sub-site of CONRAM.IT, which covers broader IT commentary, career reflections, and general technology writing. Content that specifically relates to the home-lab, its infrastructure, and the projects hosted on it lives here. Everything else stays on root.
How It Was Built
SohoLab runs on Publii, a desktop-based static site generator. Publii was chosen for the same reasons it powers the parent site: it produces fast, secure, static HTML with no server-side dependencies, no database, and no attack surface beyond the web server itself. Content is written locally, previewed locally, and published as flat files to shared hosting.
The theme is Simple, one of Publii's built-in themes. It provides a clean, dark-mode layout that suits technical content well. However, it required significant customisation to match the SohoLab identity.
What We Changed
Custom Header
Simple's built-in logo and hero section were hidden via CSS. In their place, a custom header block was created with the SohoLab logo, site title, and subtitle. This sits above Simple's native navbar, which remains active for menu functionality including mobile hamburger behaviour and submenu dropdowns.
Navbar Height
Simple's default navbar reserves considerable vertical space designed to accommodate a logo alongside the menu. With the logo hidden and the custom header handling site identity, the navbar height CSS variable was overridden to a tighter value, eliminating the empty gap between the menu and page content.
Page Hero Suppression
Simple outputs a page-title hero block on every page template. Since the custom header already establishes the site identity, this built-in hero is hidden across all page types. The theme also injects default placeholder text into the hero area regardless of whether it is displayed — a known Publii/Simple behaviour that cannot be fully eliminated through CSS alone.
Custom Footer
Simple's default footer was replaced with a custom four-column grid footer containing the SohoLab identity, web presence links, legal links (pointing to CONRAM.IT's shared legal pages), and Conram.it branding. The footer is responsive, collapsing from four columns to two on tablets and a single column on mobile.
Navigation Structure
SohoLab was created by duplicating the CONRAM.IT site in Publii's site management, then pruning content and navigation to match its focused scope. The navigation links to the parent site for shared pages (About, CV & Résumé) rather than maintaining local copies.
Content Scope
Articles on SohoLab cover the home-lab infrastructure and the web projects hosted from it. This includes virtualisation (Proxmox), networking and firewalls, storage and backup systems, internal services, and the web presence portfolio. General IT industry commentary, career writing, gaming content, and tool reviews live on the parent site.
The writing approach follows the editorial principles established on CONRAM.IT: analytical tone as a baseline, practitioner voice, a balanced ratio of diagnosis to prescription, and consistent use of references where applicable.
This page was last updated in May 2026.