My blog so far
Reading time: 4 minutes (672 words)Author: @pugmiester
Tags: blog , personal
When I started my blog, back in April 2023, I had the best of intentions for creating lots of content. I was creating posts for weekly solar statistics, general tech stuff and Home Assistant posts. I set myself a recurring calendar event on Monday evening to remind me to post and for a while that worked. I was full of energy and raring to go.
Fast forward 8 months and things have changed. I’m no longer posting weekly solar stats as it feels a bit repetitive. I’m ignoring the calendar event as it feels like a chore rather than a reminder. In fact, I’ve deleted the event and all following events.
So what changed?
I’m not sure really. Maybe I still have too much brain fog that I seem to have had for a couple of years now, following on from catching you know what. Maybe I just have a case of CBA (Can’t Be Arsed). The calendar reminder was definitely starting to feel like a chore. I’m just not sure for certain.
Something that I know I need to improve is my workflow to make it easier to get posts created. I’m using hugo to build my site as static html files so it’s quick to build and deploy. It’s then hosted on a virtual server (in someone elses data centre so not entirely self hosted with the content updated using rsync over ssh with key only access.
My current workflow for building new posts for my blog looks like this.
- If I’m away from my Chromebook, for example working on my company laptop when the idea pops into my head, I create an issue in my private Codeberg repo to record the details (like I’m doing right now)
- Fire up my Chromebook. The Linux VM on my chromebook is where I currently have Hugo installed
- Create a new Hugo post on my Chromebook
- Edit the new post (it’s a Markdown file in plain text) and fix things like the title and add tags
- Add the contents, either on the fly or from my Codeberg issue
- Grab any screenshots or images from wherever they are located
- Move the images to the right location on my Chromebook so they’re where the static files live
- Update any links in the post with the relevant filenames and folder locations
- Preview the new post using the integrated Hugo local server
- Fix the inevitable typos in the uploaded image file names
- Fix the typos in the post
- Fix the other typos in the post
- Commit the new finished post into Codeberg
- Upload the new copy of the site to my web server
- Probably fix more typos and upload again.
It’s not a particularly difficult workflow but is often enough to make me not want to bother creating the post. I absolutely do not want to move to a system that requires some sort of content management system. I have zero intention of getting myself locked into some proprietary CMS. Everything is staying as plain text, I just need to streamline the process a little. Maybe moving the build environment to an always on virtual machine at home (I have many) might make it easier to manage as I would be able to ssh into the build machine from whatever device I’m using at the time. I would even be able to do that remotely using my phone as I’ve got my home network glued into Zerotier so things are remotely accessible if needed.
So, going forward, here’s what I’m thinking I need to do/improve.
- Find a better way to create content so I’m not restricted to my Chromebook
- Blog about more stuff, not just solar stats, I just don’t know what yet
- Figure out how to offer a dark theme for the blog
I have 2 remaining days in work this year before I finish for the Christmas holiday for a 13 day break so there’s a reasonable chance I’ll spend some time over the holidays looking at the options to see what I can do.