I’ve been procrastinating setting up a real blog for… well, years. Now it’s here. Read on for the why and the how.
Why Now?
Why now? Dunno. It seems like it’s the right time to start contributing my thoughts again. I could just post things on LinkedIn like I did about Unikernels, Tech Changes, and DevOps. I could say some crap here about wanting to “control the eyeballs” or some such thing. I don’t really care about that since this is not something I’m trying to monetize.
But I do have loose plans to build and sell a hardware product this coming year and I want to document my progress. And my open source coding work needs a place to write about. And LinkedIn just does not seen like the right place for those kinds of posts. So here we are.
What tools?
I don’t fancy paying for an AWS EC2 instance just to host a blob, though I have done that in the past. I pretty much live in GitHub these days anyway and they offer GitHub Pages which seems to be easy to use. Clearly this will be a static page web site. They suggest Jekyl, but that’s a ruby thing. Do I really want to deal with gems and ruby versions and that whole ecosystem? Nah.
Instead I went with Hugo. It’s written in GoLang (go) which is my newest plaything (and likely tooling for much of what I do that’s not in C). It was easy to install and there’s excellent documentation on how to make it happy on Github.
I have to admit I spent a lot of time dorking around with different themes. I have the artistic ability of a rock (ok, maybe not that bad) and it’s been ten years since I joyfully left any front-end work behind, so I don’t think I’ll be making my own theme soon. I wanted simple and clean, with social media links and a layout that didn’t look stupid to me. After all, I’ll probably be the one to read this most often (ha ha). I ended up picking Blackburn. It’s meeting my needs and hopefully I’ll still like it in a month. I do tend to get caught up in silly things like wanting it to look a certain way and then wasting tons of hours tweaking things just to go back to simple later. It’s a flaw of mine.
So anyway, that’s the tool chain. I just write posts in markdown and use Hugo to generate a static site that I publish into a GitHub repo. GitHub Pages takes care of the rest.
Comments?
What do you think? Drop me a note somehow. Links are to the left. I don’t want to put a direct email link but you can reach me at
gherlein <at> herlein.com
I’m considering enabling Disqus for comments, but I don’t know that I really want to deal with that yet. First things first: Hello World!
