The Previously Rolling Update Post
ROLLING UPDATE POST: How to build? How to host?
6-15-24 UPDATE
Up and running with Hugo. it’s a little less streamlined than I expected, but it makes enough sense to get me up and running. Did a little test with 11ty as well, but it just didn’t click with me as smoothly. Mostly because Hugo seems to make it relatively easy to install and change themes.
I also got an NGINX container somewhat up and running. It’s reverse proxying which is about all I want to do for the time being. For now I’m just going to copy the site manually to neocities until I get a proper workflow going some time in the next few weeks.
Also, I think RSS might be working? Consider it for testing purposes only until further notice.
#6-11-2024
Okay so I’m kinda frustrated right now with the decision paralysis of “how do I want to make this thing GO?” So I’m partly writing this to organize my thoughts, and partly writing it just to crack the seal and GET WRITING. I’ll just kinda keep adding to it as I go until I think it’s complete and I have a system in place, at which point I’ll archive it as the first post in that new system.
How to build:
So what do I want? I want to write posts, put a tag or two on them, and send them out the door. I want RSS. I want people to be able to scroll through recent posts, and then hit “next page” if they want. I want to be part of a webring. I want people to be able to click a tag and see every article with that tag.
What I’d really love is to just have a directory on whatever machine is hosting the site mapped on my local machine. That way I could do all my editing on that machine then just hit save and have the site push it live.
Maybe comments would be nice? I don’t expect this site will ever have enough readership that it would become a problem, but I want people to be able to respond and say “Hey that was a nice post!” Certainly something that doesn’t require a login. This is probably well beyond a reasonable ask for any flat HTML software.
I know that I don’t want Blogger or anything that isn’t flat HTML, so I do want something that does the crunching locally (or doesn’t need crunching in the first place, really). I don’t want to write in HTML (though after doing a bit in the neocities editor it’s not too bad), but I do like markdown. I’d honestly like a feature rich editor that just smashes everything down after I’m done, but one thing at a time.
I need to dig into Nikola but haven’t had time yet. It seemed to me on first skim-through of their docs that there were just a few too many steps to getting a post up and/or out the door, but it also seemed like something I could script pretty easily.
Okay maybe it’s a copout but Hugo does look great. Putting some notes here to their quickstart and some nice themes. I’m just gonna drop a bunch here for my own reference
https://github.com/Junyi-99/hugo-theme-anubis2?tab=readme-ov-file
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-theme-tokiwa/
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-theme-stack/
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/blowfish/
How to host:
A strong case has been made to just run it on a Raspberry Pi. I’ve got an old Pi 3B (I think?) lying around that would be well suited to the task. I’ll probably start with that. I’ve got a NAS and I’d love to just spin up a docker container that hosts this site in the long run. Plus there is at least one person who would probably kill me if I didn’t at least try to run it on the NAS after all the shit I’ve given them. And it would make backups easy. I should probably start running backups on my NAS but one thing at a time… Oh I could just plug two flash drives into the Pi and have it do differential backups to the second one…
But as I’m writing this right now, during a lull at work, it occurs to me that I do enjoy being able to access this from anywhere in just a browser. I could wireguard into my home network, but I am not going to VPN my work laptop into my home.
Just leaving a note for myself here to check out Caddy once I decide on how I’m going to run the site software itself.