This is my first blog post

Hi :) I'm Dave. I'm a web developer. I've been working as a coder for a long time, but... I still feel like I need to understand how the web works. Side-projects like this allow me to test stuff out and play around :)

This blog is a place for me to write about stuff... kinda just 'cos I want to. It's an experiment.

How I'm setting up the site

I write the blog posts as md files. I use a node script as described in this guide to convert the md files into html files. The author of the original guide uses Vue to apply styling to his blog, but I decided against the Vue option for now, so the generated stuff looks pretty rough - plain, unstyled HTML. I may start messing around with including a single CSS file at some point.

Next, I'm using the nginx:alpine docker image to create a docker image of the site.

Having created a docker image, I am uploading it to the server without using a docker image repository as explained in this stackoverflow question.

The server is an Ubuntu 20.04 VM running on a Hetzner server, they're great :) I'm sure there are other providers out there who're equally great, but I find them cheap :) The server is running ufw as a firewall with port 443 exposed, so that https connections can be made to the server.

In order to run the container on the server I use docker compose as described here.

I am using letsencrypt with certbot to give me a free SSL certificate for the daveorpen.com domain.

And that's pretty much it. Link to the github repo is here for anyone who's interested :)