Alright, I don’t want a lame “Hello World!” placeholder post here. Therefore, I will simply talk about this website, my motivation to create it and how is it deployed.
I have been trying to get into blogging for the last couple of years. I have always been fascinated by static website generators for blogging. I tried lots of different solutions/generators; Gatsby, Jekyll, Next.js, Pelican (Python)…
Some of them were projects that live on some GitHub repo without any commits for the last couple of years and around a hundred npm packages as dependencies. Half of the npm dependencies are a security breach today and the other half of them are not compatible with the first half somehow. The rest of the projects were pretty simple to set up but complicated to maintain. They needed the content in a directory in markdown format, images to be somewhere else and referred from the markdown, needed to be rebuilt/regenerated and then deployed. Adding a new feature to an already working blog has a risk of breaking things and at best takes time to change and test. In return, I can host them on GitLab pages for free because they are just a bunch of static files.
After playing with different static site generators. I tried to build one or two by myself, and they turned out OK but I couldn’t invest more time to maintain and improve them. Especially the part that required me to implement some features that have been used by almost every single blog on Earth (like tags, search, etc.) was the most demotivating part. Making any simple change in appearance, layout, etc. was a pain also. But I was also ambitious about my workflow, I have been writing my posts on a specific Notion database, and a script on my home server was pulling the Notion db to detect changes, then pulling the new content as markdown and building to deploy the static website automatically. It was satisfying but it was moving too slowly for me.
Then I realized, I was sitting on top of this bell curve:
It’s not about how to deliver the content. It’s about the content itself. Yes, realizing this took me an embarrassing amount of time.
To try out the WordPress workflow, I checked out some WordPress hosting solutions. They were expensive, typically priced per site, offering limited resources, and had limited customization. I did not like the experience and decided not to renew my annual WordPress hosting package that wasn’t connected to any real sites… I decided to buy a small VPS (Virtual Private Server) and self-host my WordPress site(s), so I can deploy other services to experiment alongside WordPress. I am not an expert on this at all but at least not new to the self-hosting game thanks to the free credits that Digital Ocean gave to the students in GitHub Student Developer Pack while I was back in university.
No one will likely notice this blog on today’s internet that is full of AI-generated content. It’s relatively easy to find basic info through the documentation of the open source projects, asking ChatGPT, and searching on Google of course. Therefore, I will try to share my experiences through this blog to help people solve some problems by self-hosting their services and helping discover some useful open-source products.