Getting the domain
Just like with any other side project of yours, the first thing you do is getting a domain.
As a part of my GitHub Education Pack I got a number of options for free domain registration. As I had previously used the services of GoDaddy and NameCheap I decided to go with GetTech.
Fortunately rasjonell.tech was not taken and with a couple of clicks the domain was mine.
Apart from the fact the UI/UX for the Admin Area is horrendous, GetTech provides a number of cool free services. These include:
- Email Service (with OX App Suite Webmail)
- Domain Forwarding
- DNS Management
Creating the blog
I didn't have time to create something of my own so I had to look for help from the community. There are a lot(actually more then necessary) of static site generators. There was no way I was going to use any JS "powered" tool so I narrowed down my options to only three SSGs:
As a huge fan of Elixir I looked for projects written in Elixir to possibly contribute and have a rest from the JavaScripts I have to deal with every day. Obelisk was the first thing I found, however going to the issues tab on GitHub I found this:
So I had to make a choice between SSG and Serum. Writing this I figured out that there is no rational(or should I say rasjonell 🤔) reason for choosing any other software instead of SSG but my love for declarative programming and good ol' memories of ruby-ish syntax made me choose Serum.
Setting up the project was as straightforward as it could be. You download the software, compile it and there you go. I also installed a custom theme, for which I had to change a single line in my config file(I'm thinking of forking this theme to add a dark mode). Refer to the official guide for more detailed introduction.
Hosting the blog
Unlike my experience with choosing a static site generator, hosting was an easy and obvious decision. I used to use a number of hosting services and was mostly happy with Zeit's "0-config deployments", until I actually needed to config my deployment. That's when I faced an issue, didn't care enough to investigate it and moved to Netlify. I just magically lived happily ever after.
Serum produces a static HTML/CSS website so you can just netlify deploy site. That's it. Problem solved.
Automating the blog
I already had a personal website hosted on Github so I just abandoned it and force pushed this newer, better one. But I didn't want to manually build and the deploy the site every time I made changes so I set up git hooks with overcommit to run mix serum.build before pushing the code.
After that I configured my Netlify(❤️) project to automatically build from the master branch of my repo.
All of this is already cool enough and I really enjoyed making it. But I was thinking of making a local CMS-like environment where you just have a rich text editor and a couple of cool looking buttons for publishing or perhaps saving your blog-post as draft. However I couldn't justify this need and didn't make it. If you think it'll be cool to have such a tool or have any ideas or suggestions contact me on Mastodon or just email me@rasjonell.tech
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