binturong blog

First post! / Starting a blog

Blog

So I made a blog. I'm not yet sure if this is the finished article, but I wanted to quickly get to a point where I could write things.

Here's as good a first version as any: it uses Eleventy and their standard base blog, though I've made a couple of cosmetic changes. The build files live on my NAS, and my plan will be to hook the output up to Github Pages; I'll come back and edit about how that's gone. Test and deployment are a couple of bash scripts.

2025-Jun-15: Yeah, that was fine. I went with Cloudflare Pages in the end, which also sorted the first thing on my list below: version control for my build files.

I've also tried out Ghost, as well as Ghost with Eleventy. I can see cases where I'd use those, but this is my preferred option for now: a small, static site that I can host wherever.

Some things I could do next:

Why a blog? Why self-hosted?

Partly, I'd wanted to have a personal site again, and pages and posts makes for a pretty flexible site structure. Also partly because Soatok mentioned the world needs more furry bloggers in a 2020 blog post, and the subject came up again last year -- and, I would agree. That's something I could do. So, I'll see how this goes.

As for self-hosting: I've used various managed services to be online, because they are convenient and save time. Plus, I like using sites ran by furries for furries: galleries, fediverse, etc. But, I have still wanted a site that I could in principle host from a server at home, so this is that.

What will be posted here?

Who knows? I could write about conventions, information security, furry stuff, or just what's new with me. It's also somewhere I could put stories, although I'm not rushing to do that at the moment: Weasyl, FA, Sofurry are still fine. It's here and set up, so I can make use of it. :)