Meta blogging and welcome back
When I originally set up this blog one of the things I put onto my front page was
- Automate the deployment of this website and write a blog post about it
However, for the longest time I had a really manual setup for publishing here.
As you might have expected this site uses a static site generator. It used to be hosted on a dedicated Scaleway onto which I would SSH, pull the repo (this site is backed by a GitHub repo) and build the page. Which would then be served behind an nginx for which I had let's encrypt set up.
Eventually, I realized that this didn't serve any purpose as I didn't have dynamic content and tbh never wanted to have it. So I ended up putting this site onto GH pages which iirc were relatively recent back then? Also Cloudflare Pages hadn't launched, which seems like the cool place to put things today?
I also started out on Hugo and went to Zola because I felt like the syntax was more accessible to me as a non Golang person.
In the end, I tried tweaking the layout around but never got into a place that I really liked. However, with Zola 0.23.0 my repo got broken to a point that I couldn't even start it anymore because I needed to understand the migration from macros to components, which seems like a much nicer and more composable design, but I failed to apply it in the first go, so as anything you do in 2026 I turned to my agent and asked it to fix it for me.
I had originally intended to never let an agent touch this repo as a guardrail to loosing the last remaining bit of technical competency but then I realized the core value of this repo is, that I am able to get my thoughts out into the world.
So let me annouce my deployment pipeline.
- checkout, because it is
- shalzz/zola-deploy-action builds
- Run htmltest with wjdp/htmltest-action
- shalzz/zola-deploy-action deploys onto gh-pages branch
This workflow is too simple to actually write about but I think that is because considering my scenario this is the exact right about of infrastructure to make me not (over)think everything.
Speaking of overthinking. This post has been sitting in the drafts on 5 lines since 2022, so I'm just making myself post it as is.