When I first started this site around 2013, my intention was to create a tech news and reviews site, which was hosted on WordPress. As I worked on that project and shifted away from being a Microsoft backer, I determined I did not have a passion for the project vs. My core career as a systems administrator.

Towards 2018 as I shifted deeper into Linux and self-hosting various services, I pared down the complex site, shifted more towards a personal site approach, and migrated to a self-hosted Write Freely site. At the time, I was looking for a service that would focus on writing, and no tracking or privacy tech, and maintained the site there for several years.

In 2020, I fell for the lure of more complex appearance/theming of a tool like Hugo, along with the version control workflow of GitHub and the related tooling. This system worked for me while I was committed to Linux, and was a great tool for learning the process of Git, with some geeky article writing via console or VIM. That being said, I spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting and fixing GitHub actions for automatic publishing every few months, instead of writing. That actions process stabilized more recently, but following Digital Minimalism ideals, I realized recently that this workflow and it’s issues were not in line with my purpose or preference. In addition, while it has been a while, with the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, I expect it’s a matter of time before even a basic Hugo site would end up with some form of tracking trail embedded due to the hosting platform, which is not in line with my own privacy statements.

That brings me back to this week. I spent time pondering over the Write.as hosted platform via the Pro subscription, with it’s related and included services, and remembered why I originally used the platform via the Write Freely option. Since I originally left the service, and returning to the paid platform, Matt and his team operating Write.as have expanded and solidified the service all while focusing on their ideals. With this service, I’m able to return to having the site @writing@techzerker.com">federated as @writing@techzerker.com, I can easily support discussion via the linking with Remark.as, and with a recent intention to explore Photography beyond a smartphone, I can display and discussion that via the included Snap.as. Finally, with the support for custom CSS, I’ve been able to do minor theming to my style, while keeping the site simple, reading focused, and free of unsightly graphical advertising or intrusive tracking technology.

I’m writing this piece as a fan and user of the platform, there has been no form of compensation or promotion, but I say, it’s worth checking out if your looking for a place to write with simplicity, no tracking, and no distractions handling administration.

Discuss...

#Writeas #Writefreely #Github #Writing #NoTracking

—Scott

The inspiration for this little commentary was the recent events as I started returning to some writing (and coding) plans. This site is built with the Hugo framework, and hosted via GitHub Pages. When I returned to start writing a bit of a history and way forward artcile on trying to get back into Coding, and tackling a #100DaysofCode challenge, I found my GitHub Actions tasks that publish these posts were failing. Hours of searching and mucking about, and the action workflow that had previously worked just kept failing, and every element of documentation I could find for the most common workflow scripts, pointed to the same failing solutions. Because these most common solutions relied on importing other components/scripts, I was not getting decent or useful error logs to explain why the failure was occuring. I know there are methods to further pull those workflows and components apart to troubleshoot, but I wanted to keep searching, and that's where another personal blog, more or less shouting into the void of the internet, solved my problem.

In my searching, results came up pointing to a personal blog Matt Harrison, a fellow advertising free, Hugo built and GitHub Pages hosted blog. Like myself, the writing is sometimes sporadic because it's not designed as a source of income directly, and it's not built to encourage agressive likes/favorites/shares. The article itself was Automating this Hugo Blog with GitHub Actions. Matt gave a well written summary of GitHub actions, and then provided his own actions workflow script. The main script was followed by a nice breakout summary of the key stages of the script and what they were doing, which solidified by understanding of the process. Because it did not rely on other pre-build actions, beyond the standard git checkout action, it was easy to understand what was going on, and it solved my own problems perfectly!

For my use case, the only change I had to select a different Hugo version required for my theme, as well as update the curl download to pull Hugo Extended, also required for my theme:

    steps:
      - name: Install Hugo
        env:
          HUGO_VERSION: 0.86.1
        run: |
          mkdir ~/hugo
          cd ~/hugo
          curl -L "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_Linux-64bit.tar.gz" --output hugo.tar.gz
          tar -xvzf hugo.tar.gz
          sudo mv hugo /usr/local/bin

Once I realized this solved my problems, and I could get back to writing, I was excited. I reached out to Matt to give a quick Thank You for his posted solution, and recieved a pleasant response back equally agreeing that often this type of writing feels like shouting into the void. So hey, if you're reading a small site like this, especially one not pushing advertising and tracking, and you find it useful, reach out to the author and let them know it helped, it's always appreciated.

If you are looking for more reading, I maintain my own Blogroll listing here on the site, mostly generated from my MiniFlux RSS Feed. Some of the entries in other categories are larger sites with tracking and advertising, but first on the list is personal Blogs that I like to follow, and I occasionaly update the list when I find new entries. In the next few days, I'll get onto that planned article (now that everything is working) on my development history/education, and my plans for the future.

#Blogs #Community #Hugo #Github

—Scott