First Post

Hello traveller!

I’ve been in the system administration and engineering spheres for nearly a decade. For a long time, I’ve just dumped my troubleshooting steps, journals, and “documentation” into text files. I did this with good intentions; they’re easy to transfer, easy to search through, and text files are obviously quick to create. The glaring issue with this, though, is that if someone else needs something from my notes, it’s not easily sent to them in the same way, in fact, they’d need to come to me directly to get this info. This site is a sort of middle-ground. I didn’t want to have to manage something as huge as a CMS on top of a webserver to share my documentation and experiences with the world, though, so this site had to be statically generated. Another benefit of that is that I can easily migrate between static hosts if I feel like it, simply by copying files.

To figure out what my options were, I used the Awesome Static Website Generators list. Luckily, there’s a ton, some maintained and some not. First, I tried mkws, a tiny sh script which uses a combination of skeleton templates to ultimate build out your site. Had I not wanted something more geared towards blogging and frequent updates, I probably would have stuck with it. However, for my purposes, it didn’t do quite enough. Eventually, after some back and forth, I found what the site is currently using as of this post, ABlog, a Sphinx extension which converts static documentation websites and themes into static blogs. After a small amount of setup (took me about 30 minutes including bucket creation and DNS), I was quickly able to get this blog up and going.

Anyway, that’s all to say that this site is my internet-hosted junk drawer. I might post non-tech stuff, I might post some absolutely disgusting fixes to strange problems I’ve encountered, or maybe, like most junk drawers, I’ll forget about it and all the stuff inside (hopefully not though).