My Free Blog Setup

I thought it was worth documenting my current setup for this blog. Most of it is automated and it costs me nothing to host it.

I use Zola to generate the site. It is a static website generator that effectively takes markdown documents and a theme and produces the site.

The theme I use is based on DeepThought with a few tweaks and customisations. I like this theme as it supports all the features I wanted - such as search, static pages - in a nice clean way.

When I have written a post I test the site using:

zola serve

And once I am happy with it I build the site with:

zola build –output-dir docs

I host the site using Github Pages so publishing the site is simply a case of submitting the changes - I use GitHub Desktop as it is very simple.

I have also setup the site to use a free Cloudflare account to handle the HTTPS and also improve performance.

The latest change I have introduced is to use Obsidian for creating the posts. I have created a draft folder under the posts folder and set Zola to ignore this folder. I can now create posts whenever I want and only have to move them and update the post date to make them visible.

I have a template set for each new post so it simplifies the post creation significantly.

Links

Zola

DeepThought

GitHub Pages

GitHub Desktop

Cloudflare

Obsidian

Random Posts

I rely on RSS

I rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep me up to speed on what is happening in the world.


Read More

Learnings from my jobs

I have had lots of jobs during my life and I think I can identify at least one thing I have learnt at each of them. I usually know it is time to move to a new role if I no longer enjoy it or I am no longer learning something new.


Read More

Thinking differently can be worth a lot

We use the technology Apache Kafka as a key element in the implementation of the distributed ledger we have developed.


Read More