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November 11, 2019 ☼ meta

moving to blot

I’ve moved my blog to be on blot.im. Prior to this very site, I had personally built my blog with Hugo, hosted on github pages using Namecheap domain + some Cloudflare services. But given my circumstances as an army man, and with such tech stacks, it was nearly impossible to update my blog when I was in side.

The computers I get to use in my base are 32-bits Windows 7 (might be XP, not sure) machines with lots of restrictions. Like, everything gets wiped after each logout. Every time I boot up, I start with installing Opera web browser since Chrome & Firefox are stuck somewhere in version 27 and they are not allowed to update itself…

A somewhat-optimized steps to push a post to my old blog were as such:

  1. Install Opera Browser
  2. Login to Google Drive, Digital Ocean, and Github.
  3. Add a new file on my github repo, copy paste the post, and commit it on github.com (on the web).
  4. Boot/log into my ubuntu droplet on digital ocean.
  5. Using the web terminal (on digital ocean) pull the changes and build a new version of the blog with Hugo
  6. Push changes to github.

It was painful.

Recently, with my surprise, they got us some super fast linux machines at the lab. But of course they blocked the terminal and most of the goodies that linux provides. And again, everything gets wiped after each use. I was quickly let down after trying one out the first time. Expensive linux machines were just for the web browsing. Still, with this new machines, I thought about using Hyper and other linux-friendly tools to continue working on my older version of blog, but it felt like it was too much to bear in the longer term.

With Josh’s recommendation and continuous praising, I’ve moved to blot.im. I was surprised to find out that I could simply use Dropbox to edit/update/post to this site. Although I’m using git at this very moment as I’m out on a vacation, I’ll switch to dropbox client once I’m back inside. Hopefully this (and the nagging from Josh) will enable me to post stuff more frequently.

:)