Austin's Blog

Returning to a Home-Spun Web

I'd like to remake my own homepage in my own image, in my own style. As I've been browsing sites like Neocities, as I've been circling the webrings and diving into the various rabbit holes on the Neocities-powered homepages, I've become inspired.

I started going through the Neocities HTML tutorial, even, to get a feel for how the site encourages creators to make websites, and even though I "know" HTML I found a few new things that have been added since my last time around (like the <details> tag).

Going through their tutorial reminded me of my 8th grade website development class, which I mostly used to create lists of my favorite albums at the time (Led Zeppelin figured heavily into this, thanks to my dad's influence).

My point is, personal homepages used to be more personal. They were fun! They were all different in their own weird, wonderful ways. I've since found several blog posts on the topic of making your own website:

Just to name a few. So this has me on a web-development kick (more "static web" than the "dynamic web app" stuff I'm used to).

This has me exploring Hugo, a static site generator, and its capabilities for generating HTML from Markdown. I'm especially interested in generating multiple sites for the same domain, such that my main homepage is at austinpocus.com and my blog will be on austinpocus.com/blog/. I'd like to have separate styling for the /blog/ subdirectory, so that it has its own look and feel.

I'm not completely sure how I want to go about doing this. I think there's a few options: I could try setting up Hugo with multiple sites or themes configured, somehow, or I could set up a reverse proxy on austinpocus.com that directs traffic to different servers with different content and styling depending on the path.

However I end up doing it, this will require some operational hacking on my part which is fun for me -- I got my start working on low-powered Linux machines, deploying home servers and whatnot, so this is a return to those days. I don't think I want to try using Netlify or similar services, tempting though it may be, since they aren't really built to do what I'm asking of a single domain as far as I can tell, and I'd rather learn how to do it "the hard way" anyway.

So that's my next task, to figure out how I want to deploy this. I figure I'll end up using tools like Caddy for the reverse proxy / server, and Docker to make it replicable across machines. Last time I was doing serious ops work, it was with shell scripts! I didn't have Docker back then to make my work reproducible like it's expected to be today.

One advantage of this is that if I want to change hosting services, I should be able to just deploy that compose.yaml with Docker Compose against the new machine, and hey presto, a new site! It's really cool to work with this tools in earnest after years of working on Linux "by hand", configuring things in a one-off, bespoke manner (I've used Docker as a developer, but never in a serious devops capacity like I'm doing here, so it's a bit different).

Next, I'm going to do some experimenting with Docker Compose and maybe the Caddy server to set up my own deploy pipeline against a VPS instance (working on my own machine first, then the VPS). I'll try to update here when I have something concrete. 'Til next time!