my new home on the internet

If you know me you must be aware of my failed attempts to create an online identity.

I started blogging back in 2004, in 2010 I started my own newsletter based blogging platform techtrika which had close to 200 odd subscribers. A few years later I started my own "tech-blog" 16gigs.com, but kind of lost control of the blog and finally closed it down.

Now I am kickstarting a new website happytripathy.xyz !

What made me start a new site was a simple project I took up few months ago.

I am hugely dependent on git for my personal web development projects, its the perfect tool to version control your code and roll back is easy. I started off writing a bunch of shell and python scripts to create a customised and fully automated CI/CD pipeline. It automates a lot of my tasks from creating a repo, setting up hooks, linking with my server at home, running a build, check basic test cases, and finally a custom script to push code to the upstream server with just one command! Super easy ehh ...

This made me think

Can I use this CI/CD pipeline to run an entire website ?

I hooked up my custom CI/CD pipepline to a jekyll based static site generator and voila a fully automated website, running on a tiny VPS (with 1 core CPU and 192 MB RAM).

All I need to do is write a post on my desktop/laptop/mobile using a markdown editor and then issue a single command on my server, thats it, a new blog post is published or something on my website is updated! If something goes bad, I call my custom rollback command and we are back to a previous stable state.

I further took advantage of this pipeline by hooking it up with multiple sub-sites, a homepage which is a porfolio page for myself, then a resume sub-site, and finally a blog.

Now the difficult part, generating content and making sure readers come back to my blog, but I know I am good at that :)