This year round I thought I would have a go at one of those do-something-for-a-month challenges. #31Days, or “31 Days of …”, or whatever you want to call it. Inspired by the many friends from the IndieWeb community who have gone before me at the IndieWeb Challenge (2018).

I thought I would start off by building a place for me to post to. But this time using a completely different tech stack from what I am used to working with.

The entire site you are currently looking at has been generated with a static site generator: Zola. A somewhat random and arbitrary pick: I just wanted a single binary that would be quick to execute on my old MacBook Pro. Zola fits the bill well.

In addition I wanted to get started with the simplest hosting of these static files as possible. This page is therefor currently hosted by GitHub Pages. As long as I can commit and push static files to GitHub, this page will always be live.

To bring in even more new technology I have also experimented with GitHub Actions. More specifically the Zola Deploy Action. This means whenever I push any changes to the content of my site, GitHub will handle the rebuilding and updating of the live assets.

I imagine I will be tweaking this theme a lot. It is the most basic of basics right now. That too I am trying to handle in the most dynamic way possible: the Kronkels theme is available in a separate public GitHub repository. You will be able to follow my changes there, use it yourself, or help me fix things. It is included in the private blog repository as a git submodule to easily keep it updated.

Now that I have set up my first GitHub Action, I am itching to dive further into it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the private blog repo would automatically update its theme submodule every time I push to the theme’s repo..?