Your blog post reminds me of my adventures working as a sysadmin at my university from quite awhile ago 😄 especially having to rush to fix the broken computers before the next class started 😂
About the website itself, I find it really cool that you made it yourself, and the vibe really reminds me of old geocities blogs 😄
Given the strong feedback given so far, I will provide a few ideas of the tiniest changes I think you can do that will make it a better website:
Currently your blog post is separated into a day per page. It gives it a sort of diary or star trek’s “captain’s log” feel, but for fast readers it isn’t that practical, and the next button is often assumed to be for the next article, not the next section of the current article.
I would switch that pagination for a single page, with nice big titles splitting it. Don’t be afraid of putting a lot of text on the same page, that’s what blogs are for and your readers will thank you! 😄
And second (on Firefox for Android at least), is that the font size for the blog post only is a bit too big. About 3 to 4 words at most fit into each line, which makes it disruptive to read. The font size on the rest of the website is fine though! Double check if other mobile browsers have the same quirk, maybe this is something specific, but if it is universal, I would shrink it a bit and target about 7 to 8 words per line, that allows the flow of reading to be much easier. Make sure you don’t shrink the font size too much though, otherwise people will have to squint their eyes to read 😛
With these two changes, I think your blog will have a nice balance of retro style with usability 😄
Some people mention static website generators and other things, I think you don’t need those for the start of your adventure in making your website, but in the long run it might be a fun idea to adapt your theme into a static site generator like hugo, which uses go, which you already know, or jekyll or one of the others. They give you additional cool features like RSS feeds so people can subscribe and be notified when you publish a new post, and make it easier to change the same thing across all pages, all while keeping everything super simple and generating static html and css that you upload to your server. But for now, your website is really cool and you should be happy for it!
If they really didn’t provide you any more information than what you mentioned in the post and comments and you won’t even be permitted access to maintain the server, I wouldn’t complicate too much. Even if you could do more, you’d be guessing, and probably make life harder for the researchers who might not have the expertise having to actually maintain something too complex.
Do the bare minimum to make it functional and overall secure, make sure the operating system works, get SSH access configured for as few people as you can get away with, and make sure updates are installed automatically. They should be responsible for everything else and you should make that clear to them (backups, software, etc)
Provide notes on what you did to the future owners of the server and maintenance instructions as well.
If you are part of an IT team in the university, and if you have some leverage on it, make sure you have the authority to handle things on an emergency (like having the right to pull the plug if the server becomes rogue or misbehaves somehow). Also look to see if you can push them to a more standardized alternative, if your IT team provides standard services look to see if their use case can be fulfilled somehow by them, even partially. I know a lot of universities provide code forges and job submission clusters students and teachers can use, maybe their use case fits these.