Welcome to the the very first post which marks the beginning of a space where I document my journey through all things tech. I love tinkering with tech, automating things and making my life easier by doing these things.
If you’re into homelabs, automation, or just enjoy reading about peoples failures! Stick around and I am sure you will be entertained!
The journey to this blog #
I had attempted to create a blog multiple times for the last few years but due to one reason or another it was not successful.
Blogger , was the very first blog I had created. the best thing about that was it was easy to set up and start blogging. However, at that time I had no real content or plans on what I wanted to do with it.
WordPress , was the next platform I had used, it was nice however after the first few posts I again had no content to add on. Even though, I had no content to add I wished I can use a custom domain on the free tier.
Self-Hosted WordPress , to use my own shiny new domain I had decided to just self-host my own WordPress instance as at that time I was fully into self-hosting. This was great, a fully featured Content Management System (CMS) with all the features of a paid version. With all these features I had so much POWER!!! and with great power comes great responsibility. While using it I had realised why its called a CMS and why full time jobs exists for WordPress admins. There were just so many configurations to tweak, to manage, plugins to update, vulnerabilities and updates to manage. Soon I was tweaking more than blogging. In addition to that, it is also a very heavy software for just being my personal blog and as it uses a database to store information, there was no easy way for me to migrate to another platform easily.
Self-Hosted Ghost , after using WordPress I started looking for something that is a little leaner with fewer config options as what I am looking for is to simply write and publish with minimal configuration work. Ghost looked great it was much lighter, using newer tech, with morden features that bloggers are looking at without the need for plugins! It was great, but one thing that still remain was it was still too much features for what I had needed. I used it for some time, and then I discovered the Hugo! This fit my needs exactly!
Self-Hosted Hugo , finally I found what I had been looking for. Hugo a Static Site Generator (SSG) gives users the power to just create content using Markdown files, and it will create the blog with these files. A simple, light weight blogging platform with minimal bells and whistles.
The blog’s architecture #
With Hugo I can set up an automation to automagically publish my new posts after I have written it together with backing it up with version control! Its also known as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) in software engineering terms.
- My main PC: The place where I create, and edit posts
- GitLab with Runners: my blog repository, with a CI/CD pipeline that runs whenever I push new changes to the repo
- Blog Deployment VM with Nginx: A separate VM which is external facing hosting the site and nothing else
- Hugo: Fast static site generation
- Blowfish: Beautiful theme for the blog
First I had created a repository of my blog in my Gitlab instance, then I had installed Hugo with Blowfish theme. Next, I had created a pipeline so that whenever I published a new posts it will be triggered which will generate the new site layouts and publish it efficiently to my Blog VM.
Once this is set up, I just start a new post on my main pc. Once I am happy with the post content I just run these 3 commands.
git add . - adds all the new changes that I have
git commit -m "message" - commits the changes that I want to finalise
git push - pushes the new changes to Gitlab
Gitlab would then trigger the pipeline which would then build the website and copy the new site content into the VM. Then the new site would be displayed to the public.
What to expect from my blog #
I plan to post monthly and cover what I have been working on for the time. Currently I do have a list of topics that I want to write about, however they are just topics without any content. The final goal for the site would be to a record of all things I tried and worked on.
What’s next #
Here’s what I plan to work on next:
- Customizing the Blowfish theme to match my style
- Writing more posts
Thanks for stopping by and reading my very first post. If you have questions, ideas, or just want to connect feel free to reach out.