First Post!

My goal for this blog is to share ideas and details of the projects I am working on in a space I own. You can read more about those goals on the "About" page.

In this post, I want to describe how I'm doing that.

Static Content

Like the ol' 'Blogger sites, this site is generated as a series of static HTML pages. Unlike the original 'Blogger, I'm using 11ty, a Node-based static content generator. As a former .Net developer, I tried a few .Net-based site generators, but I had one main goal: a personal blog's home page should be a long list of posts with all the content from each blog post. I'm not going for pageviews or trying to lighten the load on the database. Old-school blogs did it this way, and so should mine.

As I explored various engines, I was unsuccessful when I tried editing templates and configs to get a home page with all of a blog post's content. I finally found 11ty and the eleventy-duo template and figured out how to do it; that is what I'm using. But the more I've customized my template and its functionality, the happier I've become with the 11ty.

Hosting

When I started building websites, publishing an update consisted of selecting all the local files in WS_FTP and pressing the copy to the server button. Source control was a .zip file or a copy of a particularly complicated script file.

I'm happy to have git and release pipelines to make things safer and more secure. I'm using GitHub for my private repo and Cloudflare for my build pipeline and hosting. Right now, my Cloudflare service is free; I hope it stays that way.