Hey there! In my last post, I mentioned that I was using Publii[1] to publish my posts, storing them on GitHub and deploying them with Cloudflare Pages. I had a few reasons for doing this:
At first, everything was going great. But then I started having trouble with the theming. Publii uses a theming format called Handlebars[4] and its own taxonomy for posts. And even though I had Publii and GitHub all set up, I still felt like I didn’t have as much control over my site as I wanted. Don’t get me wrong - Publii is great if you just want to write posts and publish them without worrying about how they’ll look. But I wanted more.
So I decided to start over from scratch. I got VS Code (which is amazing, by the way) and started with a basic HTML5 template. I’ll write more about how I built the site in a future post.
As of 25/03/2023, here’s where things stand:
There are still a few things missing (like the dark mode toggle not working quite right) and some other fixes I need to make. But for the most part, everything is working great.
I’m still storing the site on GitHub Pages and deploying it with Cloudflare. But now, I have complete control over how my blog looks and feels. It takes a little longer to publish a post (since I write in Markdown and then have to convert it to HTML), but it’s worth it. All in all, I’m really happy with how everything turned out!
Publii is a offline CMS. Think WordPress for blogging, but stored on your computer. ↩︎
The blog was hosted on a VPS on Contabo. Contabo was great, but too much for simple blogging. ↩︎
The choice of Cloudflare was a convenience one. I use it as my DNS manager, so less sites to keep track of. But really, any CDN service with a free option would do the trick (Like Netlify, or Vercel). ↩︎
Handlebars isn't a difficult theming language. I just didn’t want to add more systems to my site and make things more complicated than they needed to be ↩︎
