Hello, World!

I have a blog! Well, technically I already have several blogs. But those have opinionated topic themes to them, and as such there is nowhere I can go to scream into the wind about the things I care about (what is this social media you speak of?). But there is also another reason for this new blogspace..

After fine tuning a homebaked CMS (Content Management System) for my website in Python to perform exactly how it wanted it to, I thought I should take a look at existing static website CMS's to see if there is anything I hadn't considered (I know, wrong order of events, but I'm a clumsy hobbyist, and this is just how I work play). In my search for static CMS's, I happened upon a software called Publii, which piqued my curiosity.

I consider myself a specialist in, or at the very least a staunch advocate of, what I call Low-To-No-Cost solutions. In building my main website I took note of how much graft it took to get my website to require the minimum amount of work, and how very specific it's use case became as a result of that process. As a thought experiment I pondered of how an equally cheap solution could be offered to those less tech literate than myself. And it looks as though Publii could be the answer to that question.

I will be using Publii for a little while, to learn a bit more about it before I begin suggesting it to others as a solution. And maybe I'll keep using it thereafter if I grow fond of it? It's looking like there may be a few hurdles for me to surpass, the first of which is that I do all my computing on a Raspberry Pi, and there isn't currently a version in release for Arm64 Linux. This was solved by using an Arm64 community build by casimiroarruda, which unfortunately is a few versions behind and doesn't include the pages feature that allows user's to expand their blog sites into static websites proper. But for this use case, that's not really a feature I need, and I have a friend exploring the software on his Macbook too as a potential exit for him out of the Wix ecosystem. Nonetheless, and despite it not necessarily being my forte, I had a stab at compiling the Electron app from source in node, and packaging into deb, rpm and appimage formats on my own machine - but it soon became evident to why the Arm64 build is not on the current version, as it just doesn't work on Arm.

So, here begins my new blogging adventure..