Building this blog

Since I’m young I’ve always liked making tutorials on all sorts of things. I first started making videos before my teenage years on how to make a led blink using arduino. To be honest these were kind of awful :-) But I liked the experience and I’d like to try myself at it again.

The idea is just to share some fun experiments, solutions or thoughts I might have without thinking much about it.

So here we are, building a blog!

What I wanted:

For the sake of simplicity I wanted this website to be able to run on its own , so it

should not require

• a database
• external services

should have:

• markdown support
• be highly customizable
• full stack
• fun to work with :)

All of this made me consider a combination of Elixir and Phoenix a web Framework built for elixir. Of course I’m biased in these choices as I have discovered Elixir in the past year and I have fallen for it.

Phoenix is much more than just a web framework, it allows me to build apps much faster than I used to do. On top of that I love the fact that my whole websites lives in one single codebase that I can update easily. This is without mentioning all the benefits of elixir and the functional langage paradigm that I’m starting to adopt.

This set up lets me easily build my blog/portfolio and allows me to further upgrade it when I’ll have the time or need.

Using NimblePublisher

NimblePublisher as of their github repo is a minimal filesystem-based publishing engine with Markdown support and code highlighting. Remember I wanted markdown support, well that is exactly it. It allows me to simply write blog post with code as markdown and NimblePublisher takes care of the rest. Here is how I would define a blog post:

%{
  title: "Building this blog",
  author: "Aimé Risson",
  tags: ~w(Elixir Phoenix NimblePublisher),
  description: "Short post on the technologies used to build this blog and portfolio."
}
---


This is a *markdown* document with support for code highlighters:

IO.puts("test")

Effective!

Hosting

Thanks to Phoenix it’s very easy to build a docker image out of my project and after a few github pipelines, my website is deployed on my personal kubernetes hosting multiple projects.

That’s all, thanks :)