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2026-05-02 making of

goal

Host some static blog-like content, and be as simple as possible to maintain and publish. I'm not a web developer, and anything that takes mental effort on top of writing is a bridge too far, for now at least.

tech stack

background

I'm approximately a backend developer or a data scientist or a machine learning engineer depending on the week. I like tmux, vim, markdown files, and ssh-ing into things. I don't like JavaScript. Since this is for fun I will lean into my comfort zone.

static generation

The only real option as far as I'm aware for avoiding all the web dev stuff. I mean, I could use some platform like Mataroa but I couldn't possibly give up the control. Besides self hosting is fun, right? ...right?

I do find a pure HTML approach inspiringly minimalist, but I need to avoid HTML for my ego.

While procrastinating1 the writing and actual work, I researched some options:

  • Hugo
  • Jekyll
  • Franklin? (Big Julia fan)

And then, finally, I started playing with mkdocs at work. Wow is that simple! And it has a bunch of nice themes. Enough procrastinating, I'll roll with this until something shinier comes along.

domain

I've had nerdsquad.xyz for a while, so I'll just use it. A college buddy put me in his phone address book that way and I'm taking it as a compliment.

source control

git, obviously.

continuous deployment

Sure I could set up something fancy with GitHub actions, jenkins, who knows what. You know what's reliable and dead simple? cron. Well, I haven't actually done it yet, but I assume it'll be easy. TODO.

Maybe I'll get even fancier and script building and deploying straight from my Obsidian vault... Even more TODO.

the end

If you're reading this, it worked! Cheers -- and might I suggest you check back in on an exponential backoff.

  1. I've had the domain since 2020-06-14, so only about 6 years before finally doing something. 🤷 ↩