Building my own website

As I said in a previous post, I aim to build my own Zola-powered blog and portfolio site theme someday. I say someday, because as you can see by the time difference between when these blog posts were created, stuff gets in the way. That's not to say I haven't been keeping busy: I superpowered my Neovim-note taking with the awesome Markdown LSP marksman, I've incorporated tmux further into my life and in general, found a workflow for me that is, quite honestly, empowering. So far I've only used it for work but I intend to organize my personal note taking and self-hosting in the same way: lots of linked documents, todos, Wikilinks everywhere. And to top it off, a [CI\CD pipeline] that feels pretty magical already. The icing on the cake would be a personal twist on either this website's theme or the anemone theme. So! Am I there yet? Well.....

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Basically: no. The screenshot above is how far I am now, which isn't very far, obviously. First, I started fidgeting with a local clone of Apollo, which confused me more than it taught me anything. Then, I started to pick apart the anemone theme, as you can see above, and got stuck again. Finally, I thought clearly, and tried to read the actual Zola documentation. Not that this solves all my problems, but it did give me more of a grasp of core Zola concepts:

• pages
• sections
• (blog) posts
• What the _index.md file does

The idea

What I would love to have is a sort of online second mind: a place to dump my experiences, things I learned, projects I'm working on, new programming and self-hosting ideas. So that will be the entire point of my new website: a kind of self-documenting space that I build while I fill it. Which obviously can only go right 👀.

To sum it up, I want this new site to have:

• Mindmaps and diagrams 📝 (powered by Mermaid.js which Zola already supports)
• A portfolio/project overview page (which I think will be inspired by the direct and simple Folio theme project page)
• A journal! I'm loving journaling (on and off) and it's more direct than blog posts like these (no Frontmatter, less content organization, etc.)
• Pages (possibly with subpages) that document my selfstudy, both at work and at home (KQL, Defender/Sentinel, malware analysis & development, etc.)

And instead of trying to get all of this done first, I think I would rather develop it all out in the open, on a subpage like test.joostagterhoek.nl. I already have the Gitlab CI/CD workflow setup, it wouldn't be that hard to replicate this to another site. We'll see. Till next time!