I Started a Blog

Why do I want to start a blog? Well, you follow hackernews for long enough and it seems like every developer has a blog. It’s what you’re supposed to do. I want to write a blog as a learning experience and as a place to document my projects. As a personal preference I don’t want to make use of any online platforms. Instead a self-hosted alternative is used. My only requirement is that the posts are written in markdown. This makes it easier to move to a different static site generator (SSG) should I want to.

I’ve looked at several SSGs, namely Hugo , Jekyll , VuePress , and Gatsby . In the end didn’t go with any of them because I found them either difficult to understand or overkill for the simple blog I wanted. I came across this reply on a post on hackernews. They use water.css combined with html generated from markdown as a simple website. So I too use water.css and markdown for this website. To generate the html I wrote a script in python with support for jinja templates. The goals is to turn this script into a standalone cli, which will be it’s own blog post.

The blog is deployed by a script that runs the python script and copies over the public directory to the server using scp. For now this is good enough but I want to move it to gitlab ci in the future.