Automating the most annoying aspects of blogging
Back in 2021 I had a look around and decided to base this incarnation of my blog on an open-source Jekyll theme called “Type”, though I’ve changed and added so much it’s quite some distance from the original as it stands today. As I added blog posts the performance became much worse. Initially I blamed Jekyll for this, until I took a closer look. What I learned was that the blog theme did some things in sub-optimal ways, so over the course of 2024 I have corrected as many of them as I can. Build time dropped from ~12 seconds to ~1 second.
You might ask… what’s left to do? Not much I reckon. So I took a closer look at what is involved in me creating a blog post and made a list of the most repetitive, awkward or error prone tasks:
I was still having to copy my images to my CDN server manually, which was a pain. But the software stack on the server was intimidating: I serve my websites using a collection of docker containers. I kept putting it off for a rainy day, but I knew I would evetntually get around to automating it.
The idea was to not upload the images at all, but rather download them to the server directly. I’d use a GitHub Webhook to trigger a git pull of the latest files onto my server. It took a few hours and a few attempts, but I finally arrived at a fairly elegant system I’m happy with:
