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.
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