Starting a blog

Date: 2024-12-11

Tags: Blog

Why and how I created the ThingLab blog.

Starting the ThingLab blog

I started this blog for two reasons:

  1. I want to share what I am working on with friends, family, and colleagues

  2. I want to do more technical writing

In the past I have used GitHub to share my projects with other people, but I am not always working on something that’s suitable for version control.

Requirements

The content matters more than the mechanism to display it. However I still want the website to be something I would enjoy reading.

  • Buildable in nix

  • Produces static HTML

  • Content is written in a portable format

  • Written in a language I enjoy debugging

  • Fast builds

  • Handles boilerplate, such as the sitemap, RSS feed, robots.txt, etc.

  • Large community or backers

Style requirements

  • Respects system dark/light theme

  • Readable on mobile

  • Usable with JavaScript blocked

  • Compatible with browsers’ reading mode

Hosting requirements

Static HTML is portable data, I am not concerned about a service disappearing because I can migrate the data.

  • Low cost

  • Served over IPv4 and IPv6

  • Served with TLS

Decisions

jamstack has an amazing list of static site generators with filters.

My static site generator short list was:

Generator Advantages Disadvantages
Docusaurus
  • Backed by Meta
  • System theme preferences break with JavaScript blocked
  • Written in a language I haven't spent a lot of time with; TypeScript
Sphinx
  • Backed by Python
  • Used by the Linux kernel
  • Slow to build with many pages
Zola
  • Quick builds
  • Written in my favorite language; Rust
  • Difficult to swap between themes
  • Smaller community
Bare HTML / DIY
  • Fun to build
  • Takes time to build
  • Ongoing maintenance cost

None of these are bad choices. I chose Zola with the abridge theme because it was best aligned with what I like in software, fast and reasonably minimal.

Hosting decision

I enjoy self-hosting services for myself, but I intend to share this content. I tinker a lot with the servers I use for self-hosting, which isn’t the best choice for uptime.

I considered two hosting options:

Cloudflare pages has better performance on paper, but my workplace VPN frequently triggers the Cloudflare turnstile, which is a nuisance when sharing my blog with co-workers.

GitHub pages meets all the requirements, and I haven’t had any issues using it in the past, which made it the logical choice for now.

Checks

I added a few checks in my nix flake[1] for spelling and formatting:

Then I added the nix flake checks into GitHub actions[2] to build and deploy my blog.

Source

All the source for this blog is on GitHub at https://github.com/newAM/blog