Calvin's Learning Blog

Technology Behind Hosting the Blog

I have pondered on how to host this blog for a long time that it took 5 years for me to get started. For the longest time, I read different technologies like Static Site Generators (SSGs) such as Jekyll, Hugo, Vuepress, etc. I also considered the standard Content Management Systems (CMS) like wordpress and joomla. I also considered Wix at one point. In the end, I stumbled upon 11ty and after some reading, I found it to be the simplest of all the others I have considered before. I quickly went through the docs one night before I went to sleep and saw how easy it is to setup. Then, I got lazy again and the blog didn't push through as usual.

BUT, I found renewed motivation! #

At work, we were asked to set up a CI/CD pipeline of moving ADF from Development environment to Production environment. I have had experience using this, but only as a user. In theory, I knew how it worked. I was confident that I would be able to do it in a few hours. Then, it got put off again, there were other things more important to do (as always) until the client asked for an update. (I know this sounds like a super far tangent, believe me, we will get back to the main point soon) I had to rush and lo and behold after a few hours of tinkering, I have done it! Not just for ADF but also for their ADB. It felt so good, it served as my renewed motivation to embark on another CI/CD project. Then I said why not use it for the blog? It will make things so much easier, I would not need to publish every time. I just need to commit the MD and everything will be done. It sounded so good to me that I went and installed 11ty.

Making 11ty run was so easy. npm here npx there, and the blog is ready. The next thing to consider is, where do I host this? I had a few hosting in mind, I have an existing bluehost, I have access to AWS S3, I have access to Azure Storage, I can host it in the office, I can also use Cloudflare. Again, there are so many choices and it seems I am getting analysis paralysis all over again. But ever since I started using Cloudflare tunnel. CF has been my go to for everything and I though lets just go CF. It should be the fastest way for me to host it. Within a few minutes I grabbed the artifacts and deployed to CF Pages. Voila! the blog was up. Then I thought, I thought this was going to be a CI/CD gig? how come it seemed like I did not do anything remotely related? Then I saw CF can be integrated to GitHub, so I did, and within another few minutes the blog was up. (I still didn't do anything CI/CD related, but I know it was done behind the scenes)

The next thing is finalizing the domain where I want to host this blog. The current domain calvin.calvinwinchell.com seems a bit conceited and dated. I maintain the domain since 2014 and I feel like I want a better domain that aligns more with the blog. I will decide on the domain name soon.

Overall, the experience of blogging has been a happy one, even while juggling the new baby and work, I am able to write blogs. I hope I maintain this blog well and get some readers soon. Got to go, baby is crying!