After months and months of talking about making a website/blog, I have finally done it. So here’s my first blog post to commemorate this achievement.

The Idea

One afternoon, I was talking with Josh Gaede about setting up a blog site. He kindly showed me his, and how he made it with Hugo, which is a static site generator. In this instance, it takes a MarkDown document, applies some theming, and spits out a valid HTML page out the back. In Josh’s setup he used GitHub and Netlify to do the hosting, and only has to pay for the domain name.

This idea suited me nicely as I had already written a lot of my notes and write-ups using MarkDown, and only having to pay for a domain name was an even bigger bonus; no need to pay for a server somewhere to host your site.

The Setup

I played around with Hugo and found it incredibly easy to setup and use right out of the box. My initial idea was to build a Docker image and have it run on a server somewhere. But then I found a YouTube video by Rwaltr which showed me how to host the site with GitLab (my preferred code repository tool) and its in-built CI/CD functionality.

So with a simple .gitlab-ci.yaml file:

Gitlab CI

I am able to push changes to my repo, which will then start up a CI/CD pipeline job, that will then automatically generate the static pages, and publish them.

Gitlab Pipelines

This process takes less than a minute from pushing the changes to the repo, to them being published as a part of my website.

What’s next?

I have a few ideas in the pipeline that I would like to get done; write-ups, how to guides, and documenting my journey as I try to land a DFIR (Digital Forensics, Incident Response) role. So watch this space.