Before this blog

I started out with blogging shortly after I began using Obsidian. I found this cool plugin called Digital Garden that allows users to basically have the payed publish feature of obsidian for free. (using github and vercel for hosting) It was pretty neat, and I thought to myself "wow I love this minimalistic setup, it is easy to use and looks quite pretty. I'll always be happy with it!"

The problems of my previous setup

Welp. I was in fact not happy with it at all after a while. I wanted to have new features or just customize it more and that was either impossible or very hard, since it was setup by someone else. Specifically I didn't enjoy not having comments and the site not feeling like me.

New blog

And so I set out to make a new blog. I abused Gemini to come up with the perfect stack for it, which took some time in the span of multiple days, and then I started making the actual thing ..also heavily supported by Gemini :D

The new stack consists of:

  • Zola for the static site generator
  • Codeberg for the pages hosting and source hosting
  • Pagefind for the fast search engine
  • Nix for the Nix flake to be able to easily publish and maintain the blog from anywhere (you can try it yourself by cloning the repo and $nix develop)
  • Mastodon for the comments hosting. Since I use Codeberg for hosting I can't really have a database for the comments. So I just use Mastodon.
  • NeoVim for the markdown editor

Why AI?!

Well I have two very simple answers to that, but before that let me just say that I am definitely not a fan of everything being AI and everything being made using AI.

  1. I have free access to a decent one. I work in a school and we use free Google workspace because we are a nonprofit education focused organization. That gives me access to the gemini Pro 3.1 model, which is available for free but in a veryy limited maner. I can use and abuse it almost constantly without using up the limits. (I rarely do use them up)
  2. I just don't have as much time on my hands as i used to have... I have a job I enjoy and care about, I am still studying technically, recently and most importantly I got a Girlfriend. As cheesy as that is she is the best thing that could have happened to me and not only I would'nt want to loose her over spending too much time doing nerd pc stuff, but I actually prefer spending time with her instead of this when we can. AI allows me to do all the things I always wanted like make a cool personilized blog, while not taking up too much of my time. With that said, if someone wants to make a living or a business they should consdier putting in the real work. My blog is not critical and I am fully aware it could explode at any time.

Can I steal this?

Yes! If anyone would I would be honored LoL. I would appreciate if you let me know, but it is not a requirement. As I said earlier just go look at the source and if it fits you just clone the repo and run $nix develop.

What's next?

Well I am hoping that I'll keep posting here somewhat regularly in the future. There's also quite a few posts that I will port from my old blog.

Updates

I will also try updating the web. I already have some things on mind that I'd like adding:

  • Table of contents on the side
  • Support for Emoji shortcodes
  • not really that related just a little bit: finishing and sharing my nix configs including the NeoVim config for writing these posts. (I am writing this in the vanilla NeoVim haha)
  • and much more...