Obligatory First Post

 Posted on 2024-06-20  |  3 minutes  |  452 words  |  Alex Axthelm

I guess this is my first post.

Neat.

Most of the first posts I’ve seen are either long-winded manifestos declaring the author to be an expert on everything under the sun, or a record of setting up the blog itself.

So keeping in the better of those traditions:

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried setting up a blog, but this is the first version that has non-trivial content (this post, at the very least) visible at alexaxthelm.com. Setting everything up went pretty smoothly this time around, probably because I’ve learned a lot since I last tried 😆.

Overall, setting everything up, and making it accessible took a few hours in the evenings over the course of a week or so. Roughly:

  • Getting blogdown running with the default site: ~10 min
    • Excellent documentation
  • Picking a theme ~1 hour
    • I knew this was going to be a distraction for me (based on the past iterations of this project), so I set myself a time limit to browse the themes.
    • I picked Beautiful Hugo, which is pretty nice looking out of the box, and the site-specific config was pretty easy. Also excellent documentation.
    • Previous versions of the blog used Future Imperfect, and I see this version which is archived, but also still updated more recently than the original theme.
  • Integrating theme, changing config.toml, writing About and colophon ~1 hour
  • Making some test posts ~10 min.
  • getting a rendered site into a repo on GitHub ~5 min
  • Launching main at https://namingthingsishard.netlify.app/
  • Getting deploy previews to work 5 min
    • Needed to have the Netlify integration set up before I made the PR.
  • Realizing that I should have public/ in my .gitignore like 2 hours over 3 night
    • ⚠ Do this earlier next time.
    • The real kicker is that I had put all the .html files in my .git/info/exclude, so I didn’t see the exclusion on GitHub.
  • Transferring the DNS records from my old blog to this one ~30 min
    • I was using Netlify for that too, but not Netlify DNS.
    • I released the domain name on the old site (and let it lapse back to a *.netlify.app site), then deleted site and closed account
    • The docs for using an external DNS for Netlify are outdated, but getting started with Netlify DNS just sort of worked? Cool I guess; feels weird though.
  • Writing this post ~45 min
    • Writing docs always take longer than you think.

Alternately, setting this up took a longer time, over the course of several years. What I had already:

  • GitHub account
  • Working knowledge of R and git
  • Domain name through Hover

Overall, it wasn’t that hard, and I’m sure that if I need to do it again, it will go smoother next time.

start  meta  blogdown  hugo