OK, so I’ve submitted the blog to Google, and turned on crawling in
the robots.txt so I guess I’ve “launched.” There is still CSS work to
do, and I have some ideas for improvements to Arise itself, but that’s
for down the road.
As I already mentioned, the blog is run with Arise, a static
website / blog generator that runs on Bash. It’s hardly the only static
site generator out there, but this one had a few things going for
it.
Simple thing but I like the default theme. I’m not up to creating a
whole theme from scratch (yet) so that was a nice perk.
It’s built in Bash. I live in Bash all day long for work, and we’re
encouraged to script tasks and share. More practice is always
great.
Arise is cloud-ready. Sure, I can run the Bash script locally and
get generated output and I do that when I edit the Bash script itself,
but the publication process depends on Github actions.
Cloud-ready means I’m practicing using tools like Github Actions,
Cloudflare Pages, and playing more with Cloudflare rules. I can also
move the project to a few different cloud and Git platforms for practice
down the line.
I’ve been in hosting support for a few years now and have had to
support clients using these tools, so the hands on work is
indispensable.
The comment system is also
self hosted. It is a more classic self hosted app, running in a docker
container on my home server - then using a Cloudflare tunnel to host
worldwide.
And it does great things for my Github contributions chart.
Of course, I need to start working with public repos too. Tempted to
fork Cusdis because it’s not clear how active it is, and the self hosted
instance is full of plan information for their hosted version - but I
may be speaking too optimistically right now. We’ll see.
