Yet another change in platform

Let's face it, if I were to actually write things, I would have done it by now. No, I'm all about the tinkering, and it's about time I accepted it.

I'm looking for the most frictionless way possible of publishing to my blog, so I can not publish what I write at maximum speed. WriteFreely is great:

  • easy to install: it's just a fat binary
  • easy on resources: it's running on a tiny cloud VM now, but I've served it from my Raspberry Pi for a while. That was a great, energy-efficient way of serving content I don't write to people!
  • lightweight: payloads are small, with tasteful amounts of JS and styling added in

The only dowside was that it requires a browser to manage content. I could either swallow that, sit down, and write, because it's all about the content after all, or not write and waste time dealing with it. And I'm not one to pass on the opportunity of not writing something.

Hugo

So I set up a Hugo page. With sourcehut, getting it published was 262 bytes of YAML away:

image: alpine/latest
packages:
  - hugo
oauth: pages.sr.ht/PAGES:RW
environment:
  site: gclv.es
tasks:
- package: |
    cd site
    hugo
    tar -C public -cvz . > ../site.tar.gz
- upload: |
    acurl -f https://pages.sr.ht/publish/$site -Fcontent=@site.tar.gz

One awesome thing about sourcehut pages is that, when I somehow managed to mess up the YAML and the build failed, it kept the environment untouched, so I could SSH into the worker and debug the issue (it was tar flags).

It can also publish content to Gemini, which is something I've wanted to do for a while (except for the content part).

So there was it, a nice and simple way to build my website and publish content. Thus I had to act quick and create some new arbitrary requirements. Luckily, this is not my first rodeo.

Can I publish from mobile?

Listed

I'd recently set up a Blot page for my wife. Blot pages look great, and the code is in the public domain1. It supports Dropbox and git hooks. Dropbox is out of the question (plus, I doubt they'd have an OpenBSD client), and with git I'd be getting the same flow as with hugo, so that won't work.

So listed looks like the next best thing. I'm not a fan of how prominently they feature their own brand on the page, but it looks great and it's as simple to use as it gets: pick a note and publish it.

It is based on Standard Notes, which I've been looking for an excuse to try out, so here we are!

I'm looking into self-hosting Standard Notes. The docker-compose build has been running for a few hours. I still don't know if Listed integrates with self-hosted instances of SN, or if I'll have to host my own. But the "good" thing is that this has kept me tweaking, rather than producing content.


  1. actually, it's CC0, which seems to be as close to public domain as people are generally willing to go. I have a bit of a rant on that, but I'll save it for a future opportunity. 

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