Building this blog

I’ve been homelabbing for a long time without writing any of it down. Like, almost anywhere. Now that I maintain a public repo for a project I really like, it felt like the right time to have a proper place that says who I am and what else I’m into: homelabbing, home automation, AI, and 3D printing.

And motorcycles. Motorcycles are the best.

The stack

• Hugo for the static site. It builds in milliseconds in a ways I’m still trying to learn and there’s nothing to patch…. so I can spend time learning the Actions side of this.
• A custom theme. I liked the Ghost “Source” heavily inspired by Alex Kretzschmar’s site (hero banner, big featured post, card grid), so my AI agent and I wrote a small theme from scratch instead of bending an existing one.
• GitHub Pages for hosting. I compared it with Cloudflare Pages. Either would work, but I wanted the fewest moving parts and no server of my own to look after.
• A custom domain via a single CNAME record, with GitHub issuing the HTTPS certificate.

How publishing works

Posts are Markdown files my blog repo. Pushing to main triggers a GitHub Actions build and deploy, which takes about 30 seconds.

hugo server -D        # preview, including drafts
git add -A && git commit -m "new post" && git push

What’s next

• A proper About page.
• Posts on the homelab, Home Assistant, the 3D printer, and the bike.
• A way to publish straight from my Obsidian vault…