About this Blog

Why I Needed A Blog

I am setting up my blog in order to accomplish multiple things. I need a website to put on my resume, and it would be good practice to develop and work on deployment scripts. I could also really use a website to write about all the notes i’ve take on hacking, 3d printing, and data engineering, and maybe i could even use a storefront for custom 3D prints. I am also testing integration with github actions, cron jobs, and webhooks in order to automate the deployment of this site.

Testing Jekyll

I initially tried jekyll. As of 2023-10-25, it was not working when installed from ruby gems or from the apt package manager. There was a dependency issue with one of the gems. I even tried running it in a docker, no dice. That’s fine; I was not tied to any particular framework yet. I want to make sure that any markdown website generator I use will be portable enough to build the page on a server, and jekyll seems too sketchy.

Creating with Hugo

• the blog source is avaialable to view on github

I am testing hugo. I like editing markdown in vim, so it should be a pretty good framework to use for my blog.

• Hugo quick start guide: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/
  • installing hugo

  git submodule add https://github.com/theNewDynamic/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke
  echo "theme = 'ananke'" >> hugo.toml
  

Setting Up the Crons

• testing with one minute

crontab -l
* * * * * cd ~/blog && ./pull-publish

One minute was fine for testing, but I think that is too frequent for actual use.

• changing to five minutes

*/5 * * * * cd ~/blog && ./pull-publish

Changing from Crons to Webhooks

After the initial setup with cron, I decided to implement webhooks. It is very easy to implement webhooks in github, but hard to update a server’s webroot within a script with proper permissions. I encountered some difficulty getting authentication working with github webhooks, but I was able to find a workaround.

How to do Links in Hugo

I like Hugo so far. It seems relatively easy to add images and content. One thing that seems to be an issue is links. Hugo has a reference system for dealing with this problem. It uses a template-language-like syntax to update links to point to the proper paths.

• links within hugo https://gohugo.io/content-management/cross-references/

I am wondering if it would be reasonable to construct a zettelkasten out of a blog like this using workflow helper scripts like zkvr is for github and markdown. There are already comparable solutions out there for publishing from zettelkasten like Obsidian Publish. I think I’m still kind of obsessed with zettelkasten.