$ blog init

WelcomePermalink

$ curl -sIX GET erikw.me/blog/ | head -1
HTTP/2 200

… it’s alive!

With this post I’m opening up my personal blog here! For now, it will most likely host tech-related entries and maybe some more general ones. I think some typical posts will be about problems that I’ve encountered and how I solved them, when I think that my solution could help others in the same spot as I was. Other than that, building this blog is in itself a fun experience to learn some new technologies.

The TechPermalink

This blog is built with the static site generator ( SSG (A Static Site Generator compiles the website before deployment. Then the generated web content is simply retrieved as-is by the client without any code running at retrieve time.)) Jekyll (A Static Site Generator (SSG) built with Ruby. Popularized due to its adoption in GitHub Pages.
), which is a part of what is called the Jamstack (JavaScript + API + Markup - a way of building and hosting websites.
). Take a look at their page if this is a new term for you (as it was for me) - this way of developing has many benefits compared with the traditional way of hosting personal websites and blogs!

How I first came across Jekyll (A Static Site Generator (SSG) built with Ruby. Popularized due to its adoption in GitHub Pages.
) was when I was looking into free hosting alternatives for my website. Up until now I’ve been hosting my bare-bones website on Uberspace, which provided me with a familiar environment (like the CLI person I am) for web hosting where I have a shell, SSH access, and can interface with a web server’s configuration/logs, etc. Think LAMP stack, the classic way of doing the web (although I did not use any dynamic parts for my site).

While this setup met all my expectations, and I would say this hosting provider is excellent, the opportunity to save some money and learn some new tech made me look into simply using GitHub Pages with a supported static site generator like Jekyll.

However, after just some poking around with a stub code base, I found that limitations such as the Jekyll versions being locked and the number of plugins being limited, or that the build process becomes more cumbersome if you want to circumvent this, or that the git repo can’t be private unless you have a paid GitHub account, would be too big of a problem for me. Luckily I found Aleksandr Hovhannisyan’s post about the Jamstack alternative host Netlify. I hadn’t heard about Netlify before this, but it struck me as a contender to Heroku. After trying it out for a bit I was sold, and the site is now hosted with them, using a neat CI/CD workflow with GitHub.

Well and here we are, let’s see how this blog develops :).