Resume blogging

8 Feb 2021

Almost five years ago was the last time I wrote something here. If I look back I can identify several reasons, but astonishingly the main cause was about me thinking about the need to write always something useful.

Then I was lucky to read this inspiring post by Jeremy Friesen: Happy 10th Birthday Take on Rules. I suggest you to read the whole post, but I want to quote a couple of phrases that impressed me more:

I don’t keep a schedule, nor publish at peak hours. Instead, I release what I write when I’m done with it.

[...]

So I ripped out the analytics, and chose to write according to my current mood and interests.

As I wrote on the fediverse:

I never used a proper tool for analytics, but I had the idea that one have to write something useful for others, but now, as you say, I will just «write according to my current mood and interests». I will always try to write something useful, but it won't be the goal.

This will be the new commitment, so a sort of no commitment at all. I was already working on the site itself, but without the words of Jeremy Friesen and also the words of support of Alex Schroeder this post would come later.

I want to thanks both of them!

From Hugo to Zola

If you are wondering why I switched, I'm sorry to disappoint you: no, it's not a matter of rust vs go. In fact at first, around a week ago, when I moved this site to a new VM I was still using hugo.

Then I wanted to change the style of the site and no, I really dislike the templating part of hugo. Please read carefully the following words: it's me that doesn't like it. If you enjoy it, I'm happy for you! I still wanted to use a fast generator so I looked at what rust had to offer. Zola seemed the most complete so I tried it and I was happy with the result. The switch was extremely simple and fast I must confess. Zola doesn't have a command to create new content, but I don't miss it. I simply added the following snippet to my vim configuration:

snippet zolan "Create a new zola entry" b
+++
draft = true
date = `date --rfc-3339=seconds`
title = "$1"
[taxonomies]
tags = ["$2"]
+++
$0
endsnippet

Automate all the things

To reduce the friction on my blogging workflow (but also because it was fun to setup) I'm using a self hosted instance of the CI/CD service called drone. This means that to publish this post, I only need my editor and git.

But I will talk about it another time.