How this site is maintained and published
A good and proper navel gaze.
Hosting
Both the source and built artifacts for this site are hosted on GitHub (via github pages).
It is possible to have a public gh-pages site with a private repository backing it, however I have opted to have both public. This has the upsides that I can get PRs from others and that it is easier for other people to adapt this set up for their own use. A slight downside is that the history of my edits is visible, including for draft posts. I expect this to only be an issue if I write about any sensitive topics where I do not want to make my full writing process public (I’m all for openness and working in public, but even I have limits).
Framework
This site is written within the Pelican framework.
I did not do exhaustive research to pick Pelican (but it does well in a google search for “python static site generator”), however it is in Python (hopefully I won’t have to dig into the guts, but nice to know I can if I have/want to), generates static html (needed for gh-pages hosting), and supports both markdown and rst out-of-the-box.
The other framework I considered was Sphinx. I work with Sphinx almost every day for writing documentation, so it is a tool I know. However, I wanted both wanted to try a new tool and to use tool more tuned to blog out-of-the-box.
Theme
The theme is base on Blue Penguin which is licensed Public Domain. Knowing that I was going to use GHA to build and publish the site, the theme is simply checked into the source. I have modified a number of things, in particular the styling around code snippets, the base colors, and fonts (with considerable help from my wife).
If anyone else wants to use these modifications, I would be willing to split it off into its own repo (and use git submodules), but doing that up front seems like premature optimization.
The theme is selected via the PELICANOPTS=-t $(BASEDIR)/themes/blue-penguin
line in the
Makefile.
Build Pipeline
To publish the built artifacts, I use a GHA workflow and the amazingly awesome gh-pages action from peaciris.