Today, I am setting up my blog and personal website. I have aimed for something quite simple to manage but also technically interesting to work on, allowing me to continue to get experience in some areas.
Basic Tech details
The basic requirements I had for the site.
- Markdown Support, so I can contribute to my blog in a wide range of locations and using pretty standard tools.
- Self-Hostable, I want to be able to self-host this site so I can be in charge and make technical decisions.
- Simple design, The design needs to be simple, so I can update it from time to time and refine it.
What I have settled on:
- My site is stored in a private gitlab repo. The basis of my site is the Astro Nano theme, which I added as an upstream remote repository.
- I have a staging environment for my site that is running on my local homelab.
- I am working to script the deployment of the “dist” directory with npm to push static content up to my web server.
- My web server runs nginx, which is a cloud VPS service at the moment.
Some problems encountered so far
I might write about these challenges in the future, but so far my biggest hurdle was fixing the versioning of npm and my OS. Without this I was facing an error, so I had to make some changes.
Working across a few different operating systems and platforms is a great exercise. I am using Windows for my desktop PC and my web server is OpenSuse.