codeberg has a free pages feature if your only problem with gh pages is Microsoft.
~bartender, a warm herbal tea for me
I just can't seem to set up my blog. I have plenty of things to write about, ideas I want to share, projects I want to write up. A good few of these projects are even underway right now, with post skeletons sitting in a folder in my notes application. I even have a domain name already, a fun domain hack that I originally bought for a different site. However, when it comes to the actual blog itself, I keep getting hung up on small quibbles. Here is the journey thus far:
- I decide to set up the site using Hexo, similar to a previous site
- I locate an interesting theme, but some copyright text is in Chinese
- I fork the theme, translating parts of it, the README, and altering the font and spacing to better suit English text
- I decide I don't like the theme anymore and search for other ones
- I decide to reassess how I even want to deploy the site because Hexo doesn't seem as appealing anymore for some reason
I'm currently stuck between deciding whether to host it on a VPS, host it myself, use GitHub pages, or use something like Write.as
A VPS would let me use a CMS like Ghost or Wordpress, giving me a lot of power, but would also cost money for a good one and would be annoying to back up. A static site solves those concerns but then I'm spending $4 a month to serve up at most a couple hundred megabytes of HTML and images
I could resolve that part by hosting it myself, I have a few Raspberry Pis sitting around. The problem then becomes that my Raspberry Pi can't connect to my university's arcane Ethernet setup, so I would need to set it up at my parents' home 800 miles away. Not conducive for getting this setup in a timely manner.
Hosting as a static site on GitHub pages is most likely what will happen, but I can't help be annoyed at myself for selling my soul evermore to Microsoft. At least a static site can easily be migrated somewhere else if I do decide to spin up a VPS for something or get a Pi set up. That being said, I don't know that I'll futz with this for a while after, so if I set it up on GitHub then likely on GitHub it will stay.
And then there's hosted solutions like Write.as. The aforementioned seems like the best of the bunch, it's simple and at least has easy export options.. That being said, I'd still have to pay to be able to do things like use my own domain name. I'd rather have finer-grained control.
I'm going to try and do it today after my brief visit here, and I hope I'll finally have a place for the words that are begging to leave the depths of my private notes.
Edit: I initially attempted to use and created a theme for Hexo, not Hugo
Update: The blog still unfortunately hasn’t been put up, but we are much closer, I ended up deciding to use GitHub pages at the moment, but to generate it with a really minimal blog generator (my personal fork of Bradley Taunt’s barf) rather than Hugo. It’s a portable process that I understand more, so I hope that I can migrate hosting when I need to without being worried about breaking a ton of workflows.
Could sourcehut be an option ~ss? They have a $20/year plan.
Sourcehut doesn’t seem bad, but I really want to go super low-cost on this since I’m a currently unemployed college student. I’m leaning towards GitHub pages for now, and then just having it on an old raspberry pi once I head back home and can set one up.
I guess you probably have a creative vision, but still... why not smoll web or gemini? It feels easier, and it might prevent the interface from coming between you and your words?
I definitely enjoy smol web/Gemini, but the focus of this is more longer form tutorials and such rather than shorter form digital-garden type blogging, and as a result I want it to have a little bit more of a big-web presence if you will. I also plan to use some of it as writing samples for some gig work so the page can’t be too esoteric.
I am still considering a tilde for at least hosting, but I don’t want it associated with this identity so I’d have to make another account on a tilde so I do have to explore my options
i admit, i'm not very well-versed with coding and related ephemera, so this might not be a solution to your problems, but have you ever considered neocities to host your website? you only need to pay if you want more than one website, and it's been very easy for me to set up personally.
Neocities seems like a great starting point, but as I mentioned with write.as in the post, as more of a programmer I struggle to give up that finer grained control, I don’t want to work within the walls of a platform like that