That's the first word I posted to this blog to test if it worked. It does.

In the middle of 2022, I had the ambition to create a blog... From scratch. I had drawn out visual diagrams on how everything would work, listed the tools I would need, and the features I'd want. I still probably have this somewhere, just I can't be bothered looking for it.

Today, I was searching through the awesome-selfhosted website for some blogging solutions that I could just host myself, and get into writing straight away rather than building a full-scale solution from the ground up.

I found this one. It's called WriteFreely and I think it's pretty cool.

I was able to deploy this in about 10 minutes to already existing infrastructure. It was really easy to set up. It has a small CLI wizard that takes you through basic configuration, and it allows for reverse proxy-ing straight out of the box. Awesome.

After running Certbot, and adding a DNS record on Cloudflare, it was up. Of course, in my haste, I made a typo in my Nginx configuration file, and spelt the domain as “joeymnanani” instead of “joeymanani”. Luckily, I fixed this after I realised static files weren't loading.

Now, apparently, it supports Markdown, and if you don't know what that is, it allows me to do stuff like this:

📝 Hey, that's a Markdown feature...

It allows me to customize the post however I choose, allowing me to add text formatting, titles, hyperlinks or even images. I'm impressed.

Anyways, that's it from me I think. Stay tuned for more, probably...

Yours truly, Joey Manani

#tech #blog #joeymanani #sysadmin #writefreely