Setting up the blog again

I recently acquired umarahmad.xyz and moved my old blog there.

The earlier version of this blog was based on octopress with a lot of handcrafted code. The architecture of octopress along with my excitement of setting up the blog made this a cocktail of all possible plugins and tweaks that I could manage to squeeze into a static site. Copy pasted rake snippets and hacked together web and ruby code gave me what I wanted at the time. I was happy with that.

Although, setting up those bells and whistles was fun, this made it a nightmare to manage. Since I rarely update the blog, I never actually remembered how things worked. Every time I wanted to make a change I had to go through the documentation and the hacks I made, just to figure out the full system again.

Setting up the domain and blog again gave me an opportunity to resolve few of these issues.

I wanted something simple and straightforward to manage. I also wanted to stay in the comfort of Emacs as much as possible and avoid any extra tooling.

Hugo seems to have a simple architecture for me to wrap my head around and also has good org-mode support.

I might move on to org-publish, later, when that becomes more mature just to have more control over how things are but for now Hugo seems to work just fine.

The quick start guide from hugo and this blogpost helped me in understanding the process.

I did the this while staying almost completely in Emacs which I’ll cover in another post in complete detail.

Broadly these are the filtered down steps to get to that point.

• Getting the domain: Namecheap seemed like the best option to me, costing almost 10% of what other providers did. Domain was activated pretty quickly as well.
• Setting up Cloudflare: For using cloudflare, the DNS can be setup by updating the nameservers on the Namecheap dashboard. The cloudflare on-boarding flow is quite intuitive and I didn’t face any issue with it. Alternatively, namecheap can point to github pages directly if you don’t need cloudflare to manage the traffic(link).
• Setting up Comment system: Hugo ships with Disqus but I wanted a lighter comment system with less lock-in. Utterances provides a way for this. They use github issues to manage the comments. One drawback is that people will need a github account to post a comment. Considering that most of the posts here will be tech related, it shouldn't be a problem for most of them.

I also didn’t want any web frameworks, invasive analytics and social media plugins plaguing the site. I went for the smallest theme which suited my needs, removed few unnecessary styles from it and updated some code in order for it to work in my accordance. It’s a Pure HTML and CSS theme which also makes it ideal for viewing in text based browsers such as eww

I removed google analytics. I realized that neither do I need to know the detailed impressions and click paths nor do I want to ever have ads on this blog. The adblockers would anyways not let google count the correct impressions.

The total requests that cloudflare provides along with the path based analytics with a JS plugin is about the all analytics I’ll ever need for this blog. I’m unsure if the JS plugin with path based analytics would add any value. I might remove it later. I just don’t want to bother removing it now considering their claim to be a privacy friendly analytics along with only 6KB of extra payload.

I plan on detailing the move from octopress to hugo in a second part of this blog, but since there are multiple posts about this already I’m planning to keep that Emacs focused and demonstrate on how I accomplish similar tasks in emacs.