Howdy, Is This Thing On?
Since things are uh... collapsing? I thought it'd be a good idea to finally get my blog up and running. Come in, get comfy and take a look around! Cozy right?
Getting Started (Again)
Ok admittedly, this is my 4th attempt at making a blog. This time I'm using Zola which is like Hugo or Jekyll but more Rust-y and less JavaScript-y. I can't make any comparisons beyond that because I haven't used either, but my initial impressions of Zola are good! The theme you're looking at I made from scratch using Tailwind which is the only way I can do frontend web stuff now.
I wanted to move away from what I had been using in the past (Ghost) and have my blog sit in a git repo in plain text instead. How I currently have things set up means when I push any changes to the blog's GitHub repo an action runner will automatically build my site (in about 17ms!), compile Caddy, embed the site into the binary using caddy-embed (in... a lot more than 17ms!), then finally push it as an image to DockerHub. My server will then see this new image, hot-swap it, and start serving my blog straight from memory!
Little Gremlin
You can't see him unfortunately (try looking at this page on a larger screen) but I hope you like my little rantsona in the sidebar! He took the longest to get working out of everything if you can believe it. I can disable him on a per-article basis, you don't have to worry about him 🤔-ing the more serious posts.
There was a comment section here. It's gone now.
As of March 16th, 2025 the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act has gone into full effect. The law presents a lot of challenges for hobbyist websites like this one to present any user-to-user content (like y'know, blog comments) and comes with some pretty serious repercussions for non-compliance.
The odds of Ofcom (the regulator whose job is to enforce this) kicking my door down over this blog are low if we are being honest with ourselves. But the odds are at least somewhere above zero and the punishment is a life ruining £18 million fine(!!) so it's just not worth the risk.
A kind lawyer has written up the implications of this law for self-run blogs like this one and the only way to guarantee that I am not in-scope would be to manually review all comments made before being available to the public. Not to be a big baby about it all but I don't really want to do this! I liked my current setup!
So I guess as a little act of protest and to hedge against any risk I've removed the comment section entirely. Sorry about that!
If you want more information on this and how much this sucks for the hobbyist internet please read this writeup.
