The first article I wrote and published under Wondering Chimp was more than 4 years ago. Wow! I could not have imagined that it will last that long...
From the beginning, I started quite simple, some would say lazy, having in mind my technical background - wrote down some thoughts, and decided to post it online. I chose to host everything on Ghost.org - a site that helps you easily publish your thoughts, ideas, and so on, without any hassle of building it up yourself. What I like about them is that they were and still are independent from the corporate claws and really true to themselves and the world. From then on, I learned a lot. I deepened existing passions, discovered others. In a nutshell, I think I did well!
As you may or may not know, one of the things that I started exploring and discovered I really care about is digital sustainability. I worked on my website behind the scenes to make it as minimal as I could, having in mind I was using a web hosting platform. Then I thought - why don't I build a website myself? I am not some professional blogger, journalist, writer. I do this for myself, and a handful of others, why not play with it a bit more?
This thought couldn't come in more a convenient time in my life - we recently got a new family member, so I had plenty of time to dedicate myself to side-projects. Of course not. Nevertheless, I started tinkering around things.
Since the whole website is quite simple - text, images, nothing fancy, I opted to explore static websites. I searched around and found the best solution for me - Eleventy. A JavaScript static site generator, minimal performance, and works with Markdown. What more could I wish for?
Then I went hopping around as one not knowledgeable enough would - I could try this, or maybe this, or even this? But wait, what's this? I don't know this? And so on and so forth... Then I decided to scrap all these questions and focus on the basics. Luckily, I was able to find a great starting (and ending) point to help me with that - Learn Eleventy Course by Andy Bell. I started slowly, building the demo website until it started looking like something I could publish. The whole demo is a full-blown website, my use case is just one side of that, so I built everything, and then removed the things I didn't need and customised others. And I really like the result! I hope you will to!
What has changed?
A couple of things have changed and I'll list them below:
- moved hosting from Ghost.org to local Raspberry Pi (yes, actual rpi!),
- built a website with e11ty,
- moved subscribers to buttondown,
- learned a bit of front-end development,
- decided not to post anymore sound recordings of me reading the post (for now),
- setup a Cloudflare tunnel towards my rpi (super simple, btw!),
- fixed, updated, adjusted all my previous posts to proper markdown format,
- and published this website!
What has stayed the same?
Me writing the articles with minimal AI usage. I'm not against it, that's not it, I just don't want to use it for writing. So far I have used it for minor polishing of images' ALT text, but that's all. I read somewhere something like the following, paraphrased:
If you used AI to write the article and spent next to no amount of time doing it, why would I spend my time reading it?
So I decided that this should be my motto in writing here. If I say something interesting, funny, deep, shallow, incorrect, at least I'll know it's me that said that!
Me sending e-mails with the articles to subscribers. I moved subscribed people from Ghost to Buttondown and I'll be sending e-mails with articles in their inboxes. No spam, ever! Unless you count my articles as spam...
Comments to the posts - you can still do that, you just need to be subscribed and reply to the e-mail I send you. Or if you like RSS - feel free to subscribe to the RSS Feed of the website.
Plans ahead?
Having my own, built, and deployed, personal website means that I can do with it whatever I like and think of. Some of the things I'll implement in the following months are:
- Grid awareness to the website - one of the main reasons I decided to build a website on my own in the first place.
- Search functionality - useful thing every website should have.
- Measure and report electricity usage, directly.
- Measure and report resource usage.
- And many more things I'll probably come up with in future.
A side note - one could say that moving a website from a green hosting provider to hosting it in Belgrade, Serbia, in my apartment couldn't be counted as a sustainable move, but the site is more lightweight, doesn't have any additional components other than Markdown, HTML, CSS, and some JS. Aaand, I can always plug it out!
Summary
Thanks for staying with me this long! In the end, I only have to say that I'll continue to write here! In some of the future articles, I'll write up more about the whole setup, how I build, deploy, and run everything. Spoiler alert - it's not on Kubernetes!
Feel free to share this article or any other article here if you find it useful!
See you in the next one!