A colophon for wattie.dev

The colophon is a fancy way of saying, this is who I am and this is what I’m publishing on.

I wanted to write some stuff. And I want to do it easily. So naturally, I needed a blog. But I’m quite picky

• I’m keen to keep it free. If I have to pay even a tiny amount, then its likely per GB or request. That means I should probably have a CDN in front. The only free CDN I know of is cloudflare. That means giving them my DNS. My DNS hosts other things. I’m also just cheap
• I’d like to minimize javascript. The more I have to write, the less likely any of my words see a single GET.
• I need automated deployments.
• I want to minimize ads.

This leaves me with a static site. Static sites are great. The threat window is much smaller than traditional websites. There is no database to maintain and it’s very simple to add a CDN in front, making them very fast and scalable.

So I need a static site generator. There are lots of javascript ones, like , gatsby, next.js and jekyll. None of them meet my requirements as I’m not big on javascript.

I landed on hugo. Its written in Go, that means its a single binary. phew. In 5 minutes I was writing this post.

Hosting

There are a bunch of cloud services that can do object storage. AWS/GCP are pretty cheap, but not free.

I explored Catalyst Cloud, a NZ hosting provider. They currently offer $300 credit, which I expected to last long enough. Utilising local providers is also appealing. However, their API is whitelisted, so I can’t easily call it from a github actions pipeline. Not to mention my home IP uses CGNAT, and paying for a static IP defeats the purpose. Github pages is free, so thats where I’ll be hosting this. I’ll also use github actions to do the deploying.

Stay a while and listen.