ingav (u/ingav) - Readit News

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

ksvarma · 4 months ago

This is really good to help overcome many fears of blogging!! Once you know your obsidian is linked, all your notes and writing would take next level of drafting to actually becoming a post. Thank you ingav!

Ps: Folks should chill out about wording here and there.

ingav · 4 months ago

Thank you!

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

D13Fd · 4 months ago

Honestly this sounds a bit cumbersome. I built my blog years ago using Puput (https://github.com/APSL/puput) and Render, and it has been running strong with minimal maintenance since then, with hundreds of posts. The software is all open source and free other than the minimal hosting fees.

If I want to do a post, I log in, draft the post in a simple rich-text editor with image support and keyboard shortcuts for formatting, and click "publish." I don't have to fool with anything, there is no chance of sync breaking, and it's instantly responsive.

The back-end is stored in Github, but the posts are stored, with revision history, in a Postgres database that I have full access to.

It's hard to envision a scenario where I'd prefer digging through a git repository to see a previous version of a post rather than just clicking into the CMS site and clicking on the historical version of the post that I'd like to look at, where it is instantly displayed including images. And even with daily blogging, the number of times I've actually looked at a prior version of a post is very low -- probably less than once a year.

ingav · 4 months ago

Totally get that. My post was meant as a way, not the way. I already use Obsidian for most of my writing and notes, so this setup just fits naturally into my workflow.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

superkuh · 4 months ago

How I Blog with HTML and nginx - Zero Cost, Fully Owned: Step 1. install nginx from repos on my home desktop computer. Step two: write html files and put them in directories under the web root. Step 3. forward port 80 to the webserver internal IP on my router config. Step 4. Link people to http://your.ip.here.a/somepage.html or maybe rent a .com domain.

I've been doing it for 20+ years (xitami and thttpd before nginx) and it not only has an infinite lifetime (because it's .html and files) but it also has no attack surfaces or mantainence required.

All that static site generator and remote corporate services stuff will break within a year if left untouched. And re: security, running a static nginx server from home is about 10,000x less of a security risk than opening a random page in $browser with JS enabled. nginx RCEs are less than once a decade. And DoS re: home IP? A vastly over-stated risk for most human people. In my 20+ years I've never had a problem, and even if I ever do, who cares? It's not like my personal website needs nine 9s of uptime. It can be down for days, weeks, with no issue. It's just for fun.

ingav · 4 months ago

But I’d say “infinite lifetime” only holds as long as your hardware, power, and IP setup stay stable. If your home machine dies or your router resets, things go offline fast.

That’s part of why I prefer hosting the static output somewhere external. Not perfect, but it lets me step away from the setup for months and still have it running.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

greyman · 4 months ago

Thank you for your post, it's very sensible setup. Does Cloudflare Pages offer unlimited bandwidth?

ingav · 4 months ago

Thank you. Yes they offer unlimited bandwidth.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

flanbiscuit · 4 months ago

I have a sort of similar setup but I haven't started using Obsidian yet, it's on my todo list. I use Eleventy instead of Hugo, with its simple Eleventy-Base-Blog starter template. I use Github action to publish to Github pages instead of using Cloudflare. It's a nascent site/blog, haven't written much, no images yet, so I don't see the need for something more than Github pages right now.

One thing I don't see the author mention that is part of what I plan to do with Obsidian is use Syncthing (which I already use for other things) so I can work on a post when I'm not at my laptop. Probably just to write down ideas/notes and then fully work it out when I get to my laptop.

If the blog author is here, curious if they commit drafts to their repo or not. I personally don't commit drafts. Besides also using 'draft: true` in the front-matter, I gitignore any markdown file where the filename starts with the word "draft". When I'm ready to publish I rename the file.

https://www.11ty.dev/

https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog

ingav · 4 months ago

Nice setup.

Yeah, I do commit drafts. My repo’s private, so I don’t mind keeping everything versioned there, including posts still marked as draft: true.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

jprjr_ · 4 months ago

So I agree in the sense that, you're always going to rely on something. Even if you're hosting on hardware you own at your house, using your own self-signed SSL certificates, you're still relying on an internet connection from some company.

But, I think using the term "fully-owned" to refer to pushing up to GitHub, then deploying to Cloudflare Pages is definitely not "fully-owned"

ingav · 4 months ago

What I meant by "fully-owned" is really about owning the content and the workflow: everything lives locally in plain text, versioned in Git, and built with open tools. I can move it to any host without being locked into a platform or losing anything.

You're right that hosting on GitHub and Cloudflare isn't infrastructure ownership. I should’ve been more precise with the wording.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

HenryBemis · 4 months ago

The Hugo/GitHub combo has been around/mentioned for some years.. I thought of running a blog once (but then.. no) and this was the choice I would have made. But on the other hand, if you are going to post something online, just go to blogspot and call it a day. Because that's what you did there. A blogspot (but on MS instead of Google) with many-many-many extra steps.

ingav · 4 months ago

True, Blogspot is simpler. But if it ever shuts down or changes policies, you’re at their mercy - and exporting your content cleanly could be a mess. With this setup, everything is just Markdown files and Git. I can move it anywhere, anytime, no lock-in.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

heltale · 4 months ago

I have largely the same setup but use neovim instead of obsidian.

A friendly tip: you don’t have to populate the metadata yourself and can use ‘hugo new <dir>/<post_name>.md’ to create the file with the metadata.

ingav · 4 months ago

Nice, didn’t know that. Will try it out, thanks!

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

Dathuil · 4 months ago

My own setup is similar but replace cloudflare with netlify and vscode with obsidian. However I do find writing markdown as someone with dyslexia to be a huge issue when it comes to spelling and grammer.

How is Obsidian for correcting this? Years ago I would have used something like grammarly to solve it but I'd rather something build it in if possible and make it as brainless as possible

ingav · 4 months ago

I’m not totally sure, but Obsidian does have built-in spellcheck, and there are some community plugins like LanguageTool that might help with grammar. Haven’t used them extensively myself, but they could be worth checking out.

ingav commented on How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare ingau.me/blog/how-i-write... · Posted by u/ingav

Ezhik · 4 months ago

Obsidian is honestly such a joy to write in - I use it for my blog as well:

https://ezhik.jp/

On my end I ended up building an entire custom thing that bastardizes SvelteKit to produce a static website that I then upload to GitHub Pages, but I think over-engineering a personal website is always good fun - and hey, I can tweak lots of silly aspects like how my post names get turned into /nice-and-readable-urls.

Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of using Cloudflare Pages over GitHub Pages? Both seem to require a GitHub repository.

ingav · 4 months ago

Github Pages also works, I used Cloudflare since almost all my other projects are hosted there + I use it to manage DNS.