Extending Privacy

My aging blog, built on Jekyll, has been becoming a pain to work with for a while. While hosting the static files is trivial, I had to dockerize the build process a while ago, as I had issues getting the correct ruby dependencies on modern OSes, and given the old dependencies used, it was not going to be possible to modernise it in any way.

This build friction was a demotivator when thinking about writing more, so I decided to take the plunge and try something new out.

As I like the aesthetic of write.as's WriteFreely software, which also has Fediverse support, I decided, with zero further research, to try it out. Following their getting started instructions, I was up and running in 10 minutes!

The set-up was extremely simple – unlike many self-hosted servers which need a whole host of dependencies installed and other services running, WriteFreely just uses a single go binary. Data is stored in a SQLite DB, so there's no need to install additional software.

I decided to import my old blog posts over. As the old Jekyll blog used Markdown posts, this was also quick, as WriteFreely also uses Markdown. To back-date the posts, it is possible to update the creation date when editing a post.

The final step was to add some custom routes to my Nginx config to ensure that some external links stay valid with some manual redirect rules:

location /about.html {
  return 301 /about-me;
}

As mentioned before, a side-benefit of WriteFreely is fediverse support. What that means is that fediverse clients can subscribe to new blog posts via the handle @[email protected].

Now we're up and running, the question is, whether this setup will encourage me to write me. Let's see how it goes...