Page reboot

by Jakub Ch. published on 13.11.2024

I was notified that my domain is about to expire in 30 days. That makes me realise I barely use this page anymore. That's certainly not what was intended. What went wrong and how to fix it?

Lack of automation

First and the most important: I haven’t automated the publication process. Each new entry required me to run the build process by hand, then transfer the outcome to a server. "I can live with that. It doesn’t sound like a lot of effort" — that’s how I convinced myself. Turned out it makes a whole lot of a difference.

Lack of writing aids

I wanted my blog to be generated as static site. I went with JBake, as it supported Thymeleaf I already knew and allowed me to customize the templates however I wanted. That was a good move. The bad move however was to write blog entries in either HTML or Markdown format. The first one slows down the writing, the second didn’t render as good as I wanted.

Mental block

Although writing anything serious wasn’t the purpose of this page, I still urge to make the content worthy. Barely anything seemed good enough to publish. The needless pressure held me back from writing. It was the exact opposite of the original goal of this page existence.

Solution to above problems

After realizing weak spots it’s time to apply fixes. Here’s what I did:

  • I employed maven to bake my page instead of CLI tool.

  • I switched to Asciidoc format for writing blog entries. Thanks to rich-text-editor in IntelliJ, it’s now easier to write fast. Also some automation opportunities became available e.g. PlantUML diagrams generated directly from the code sections.

  • I applied a just enough css for the content that rendered badly.

  • I moved the blog repo to Github and set up Github Actions. Any push to master triggers build process and publishes output to FTP server.

  • I promised myself to keep blog entries shorter and don’t overthink them.

Writing should be more pleasant now. Let’s see if it makes me more willing to write!