Hey there, welcome to my blog where I’ll write about the topics that I’m interested in - stuff like cooking, stories, video games, life as a developer, and everything in between. The intent is for this site to grow into my journal, to get back into writing that I’ve so sorely missed due to many reasons, and make it easy for me to share my thoughts and ideas to people who might enjoy reading them.
This also doubles as a testbed for side-projects, as I can write tools and techniques for the various aspects of the writing and publishing process, be it the visual presentation of the site itself, the editing tools, or the pipeline to update the website contents.
I’ll describe the blog more, via some questions that are likely to pop up:
Why is the blog named ‘Git Push Story’?
I was looking for a name that represented the significant aspects of my life. I am a developer, and I enjoy stories. So the name works out, as I git push for work, and “pushing” new stories into the world is something I want to do for fun.
I felt that as a developer, it is my duty to do so via an elaborate workflow to make this happen (or simplified, depending on who you’re talking to). So I implemented a workflow such that I git push new posts, and it automatically updates the live website with the new content. It’s a very simple static site to be exact, but you can trust me to add more complexity to this, so stay tuned.
Wouldn’t writing on Medium be a simpler option?
Actually, yes. I already have a Medium account, and it is easier to write and get views there. The intent for this site is to be both a publishing platform for myself, and also a muse for my side-projects, as all parts of this site are intended to be customizable, therefore I’m free to mix and match any tooling to build and maintain it.
A major benefit of this SSG workflow that I mentioned earlier is that the content lives separately as markdown files, so publishing to other platforms wouldn’t be a problem.
What does the pipeline look like?
It is a simple workflow, for now.
- This site is generated with Hugo, which is a static site generator. In layman terms, it takes in your content files like Markdown, and generates HTML out of them that makes up the website, with some very useful processing steps in between.
- This code is hosted on a GitHub repository. Therefore, locally I write posts in the site’s
contentfolder, and then commit and push it. - The static site is deployed on Render.com, which has a free plan to host static sites.
- Whenever I push new content, Render.com triggers a deploy job automatically. It runs
hugoto generate the files, and then hosts the output files via its CDN, updating the live website.
The nice thing is that I pay only for the domain. Both the remote syncing of the raw content on GitHub, and the hosting of the website on Render.com CDN are free.
I use Obsidian to write. It has a Git plugin so I can commit and push in the editor itself, like VS Code. Obsidian has better features for note-taking and writing Markdown in general. It kinda gives me the feeling that it’ll become like Arch Linux as this cool new thing. How do you know if someone uses Arch? They’ll tell you before you ask.
Thanks for reading, it’s good to have you here! Let me know what you think, and have a great time.