When I browse other people’s sites, I often find a colophon page that explains the technologies and tools used to build the site. I thought it would be interesting to create the same for this blog so readers can see what technologies power it.
What is a Colophon?
From what I read on the IndieWeb site, a colophon1 is a page that documents the technologies, tools, and workflows used to build a website. This page describes how this blog is created and maintained.
Technologies Used
Domain
The primary domain for this blog, ruz.fi, was purchased from Derp Dot Hosting with Cloudflare used for DNS management. I chose Derp Dot Hosting because they offer reasonably priced domains and a simple registration process.
Blog Engine
This blog is built with Hugo, a very fast static site generator written in Go. Hugo converts Markdown files into static HTML, so no database or special backend is required.
The site uses the hugo-bearneo theme by Rokcso, a minimalist theme inspired by Bear Blog. hugo-bearneo is an evolution of Hugo Bear Blog. Because the original Hugo Bear Blog author preferred to keep close to Bear Blog’s original concept, Rokcso developed a separate, more extensible and feature-rich version: hugo-bearneo. I customized the theme further with adjustments such as dark/light/blue mode support and several visual tweaks.
Hosting
The blog is hosted for free on GitHub Pages. Whenever I push changes to the repository, the site is automatically rebuilt and deployed using GitHub Actions.
In my GitHub Actions workflow I also use tcardgen, a CLI tool that helps generate Open Graph images (preview thumbnails shown when links are shared) from an article’s metadata.
Text Editor
I use Visual Studio Code as my primary text editor.