Dusting off the blog

Rasmus Dahlberg, 2024-05-04.

The other week I talked to my friend MC about maybe starting to blog again. I know, “starting to blog again” is a bit of a stretch for someone that didn’t post a lot to begin with. Nevertheless, today I woke up and wanted to see if I can get this thing going again. I think it requires lowering the bar for what needs to go into a blog post. Somewhere deep inside of me, I still hear the echo of my old advisor saying “a good thesis is a done thesis”. The same is probably true for blog posts, and partly why I’m inspired by MC who somehow finds the time to write consistently about anything and everything. I will try to follow suit; not overthinking and just write about what I want to. Who knows, every now and then I might just post a picture and the recipe of something really yummy? I used to like doing that on Instagram, but I no longer use such social media.

Anyway, dusting off the blog started with me migrating my Hugo project (the website’s source) from a private GitHub repository to my self-hosted gitolite server at git.rgdd.se. In the future, you should be able to clone it like this:

$ git clone https://git.rgdd.se/www
$ git clone https://git.rgdd.se/www-theme

For now it only works with SSH authentication. I can configure your public key if you’d like, in which case something like this should work to get the site’s source:

$ git clone git@git.rgdd.se:www.git
$ git clone git@git.rgdd.se:www-theme.git

What’s quite high up on my TODO list is to configure a web frontend using cgit. All my public git repositories would then be shown with a user interface similar to the Linux kernel, Wireguard, and the many other projects that all of us like.

Other than having greater control of my git repositories at git.rgdd.se (which is really sweet as I use git for my password manager pass and various notes), I plan to mirror repositories that I contribute to on other platforms. This will make it easier to get an overview of the things I’m hacking on, how nice right?

Back to me dusting off the blog. What I realized is that I didn’t have a clean separation between my Hugo project and the (somewhat forked) theme I was using. So, I spent a few hours cleaning this up in two separate repositories now:

I find it fascinating how a site’s appearance can change by fonts and colors alone. It’s quite different from the hugo-researcher screenshot, isn’t it?

If you ever get curious about which font a site is using, I can recommend the Fontanello add-on by Fred Bergman and Lars Wästfelt. Lars developed Sigsum’s brand assets. Since then I’ve paid a little bit more attention to fonts and colors.

That’s about it for this time. It was fun cleaning up the site as www and www-theme. And to actually dust off the blog afterwards, thus breaking the silence. Hopefully it doesn’t take me another year or two before I write here again.