Knowledge Base

I saw a post from kevquirk about a blog questions challenge happening in his world and I wanted to answer. To be more precise, I ran out of technical content so here's some filler!

If you are only here for technical content, you can ignore this one.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

My very first blog was something about jokes, but I'm not that funny and didn't have any material. I think based on the aesthetic or domain name or something that it was on a precursor to blogger.

My second blog was mostly technical content, but it was to fulfill requirements for a class. I called that class "Wordpress class" because using Wordpress met all the requirements, like "add a picture to the page" and I think one of the final (optional?) requirements was "allow comments." Good thing I hadn't hand-rolled anything.

This blog is my third main blog and has endured the longest. It is where I place technical content to share with the world, and for myself. I love places like SuperUser and so on, but due to the POSSE theory, I publish here. I have nowhere else to syndicate, so I leave that to my avid fans to distribute worthwhile content.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I use a self-hosted (on digitalocean.com) static site generator named Nikola which is written in python. I haven't had a need to modify the code, because the config is thorough enough. I use it because it's FLOSS and not dependent on any single entity deciding that I'm still allowed to publish. (Other than, I suppose digital ocean as my hosting provider, but I wasn't going to share my home IP address with the world just to have my private knowledge base be made public.)

I also use isso for comments, because it's also FLOSS and self-hosted. If you browse with javascript disabled, you will not be able to see comments, which I think is an acceptable trade-off. I mean, I have so much useful content in my users' comments that you're missing so much!

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Woops, got ahead of myself and answered that already. This very blog used to be a wordpress one, but I wanted to be more self-hosted and also flex my skills. Plus, now I can write in a text editor and not some cruddy web page.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?

I write in vim and save files to my main nfs export. A cron job picks up the post around its scheduled time and builds and deploys the site.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I have real technical content to share, such as a new trick in a language, or a new feature I learned about, or a new component I wrote! I write when I have something I expect I will ever want to use again. Sometimes I just blatantly copy-paste from the www (all attributed and linked, of course) because I know how to get to my site's contents even if my website is offline or parts of the www expire and the original source is not available.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I store spare ideas somewhere, but I only dump words to a file when I'm ready for it to get published. That is, I schedule these posts ahead of time, except for the one day in 8 years I forgot and was a day or two late because I ran out planned posts and hadn't realized it. I normally notice that and stress about writing something useful in time, but earlier this year I was just so happy-go-lucky and hadn't realized my 4-5 scheduled posts caught up with me and then some.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

Manipulating ssl certificates, because I use snippets from it all the time. I share commands with users from this page. This page is in category notes which means I allow myself to update it over time with new material.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Nope. I did recently migrate off of CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 9 but thankfully all the tooling above that still worked flawlessly and my readership (all 2 of them) failed to tell me they noticed the downtime!

Who's next?

If any of these following folks still read here, I'd love to see your answers!

• AlaskaLinuxUser
• redacted at user request