Oh golly I have fallen into some digital web spiral of endless surprises! I think I need to regain my trajectories otherwise I'll never get anything done. Then again...
I thought it'd be cool to build my skills in computering and whatnot by building my own website. I like smol.pub to write, and read some general happenings and thoughts of other fine peeps, and I will stay here for that. But I also like to tinker, gain control of my stuff, create and express in different ways.
So I've started building. Check it out:
Feel free to follow the Atom feed if you want a laugh at my fumbling into this new arena.
It's just a playground for the moment, but pretty chuffed with how its going. I've made it all from the command line (though I switched to an external text editor a couple times when I was fixing the many messes). I use the Zola static site generator to convert markdown files to a nice wee html package, then I push it to Neocities where it's hosted.
I made a little bash script too (my first one), so I just have to type "blog" in the terminal and then I can start writing, and post it straight up. So cool.
That then led me to wonder if I can do that from my Android phone. I found Termux, an "Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app". I could install the Neocities CLI but not Zola, so I found UserLAnd and by golly you can run full blown Linux distros on your phone! This time I managed to install Zola on one of the distros, but then couldn't install Neocities, then vice-versa on another distro.
I eventually gave up and searched around for other alternatives, finally landing on Hugo, simply because I could install it. I also needed to install git. From Termux:
$ pkg install hugo $ pkg install git
I also needed to create a GitHub account, which I wasn't too keen on. I will look into if that's actually necessary. Then of course there's creating the content, and back to customising the themes and stuff, which I would totally not do on the phone.
But wait stop. Just stop.
I like my Neocities set up. It's simple. What I want though is the ability to post from my mobile, so I was hoping to just sync folders (yet to figure out how to do that on Linux) and copy my bash script over so I can do the same "blog" command there. Maybe even create a little blog button using something like Tasker or Automate so I don't even have to open Termux.
So for now I am going to not worry about the mobile and just keep tinkering on my Zola/Neocities setup. I much more enjoy writing on my laptop anyway.
Later I will look at alternatives (the end goal will be self-hosting on a wee server, again something I know NOTHING about but am aware that this is a thing. Actually even better would be to get solar and run it off that!).
But no.. small steps. Make the website first.
Here's a dumping of a bunch of things I've been looking at/using. It's endless really. I know there are easy ways to do this like bearblog, wordpress, micro.blog, pika etc. but I like the tinkering and getting to know all the connections that move about.
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