SOFTWARE

Hello World

Scratching the blogging itch starts now

2024-12-21

This blog has been a long time coming. For years I've often thought about things I would blog about. Things like, what I've learned in software development, my journey back to self-hosting, and maybe even about the struggles of making a good shot of espresso.

On the topic of self-hosting, not using cloud services has rekindled my joy for the web. I got started in software because I just wanted to tinker with everything and with self-hosting I'm doing just that. Improvements in tooling, fast internet speeds and cheap hardware has catalyzed a trend in open source software to support self-hosting.

Now that I'm in the tinkering spirit I decided to build my own blogging framework which is what this blog runs on. I didn't really like any of the suggestions that were being thrown out such as Ghost or Hugo. I wanted to scratch 2 itches at once, blogging and tinkering. Ghost felt like a good choice if you just wanted to blog and Hugo felt good for tinkering and blogging but I didn't like how the systems felt proprietary.

This blog is a loose collection of libraries strung together to be a lightweight markdown blogging framework. The end result should feel more like a starter kit that someone can take and build off of. Enough tooling to use as-is and enough simplicity for anyone to understand and customize. Here's the tools used thus far.

One of the joys of working on this blog has been discovering that you don't need much and a feature I'm holding out on is media management. Serving optimized media for various needs can be really complex and for that reason I'm taking my time looking for an appropriate solution. Until then, this blog will likely be pretty light on media.

I'm excited to continue working on this and also share my thoughts with the web in a way that's truly mine.