Setting up rijkt.link

This is a documentation post, for my future sanity's sake. If you too are interested in setting up your own website with an SSG like Zola, keep reading. All source code is available on GitHub.

System Goals

I want to be able to write and publish text in a me-friendly way, as I am the only user. The content should be separated from the chosen presentation technology. There is no need for interactivity outside of basic navigation and maybe commenting. It should be possible to host everything on my own, to avoid vendor lock-in.

Since I recently switched my note-taking over from org-mode to Markdown, I would like the system to support it. I don't want to write inside an HTML file. The system should also be extensible and using a backend I'm interested learning, i.e. no PHP, Node or Go.

I might want to publish some notes in German, others in English. Support for multiple languages would enable this more easily.

The design should be open for me to tinker with. I will not, however, design something from scratch.

DNS

rijkt.link

Choosing a domain is probably what took me longest in this post. I avoided country TLDs after the most recent political upset affecting a popular development TLD. Choosing one that wasn't prohibitively expensive but still sounded dev/webby took a while and https://tld-list.com/ helped. I landed on .link, but this was pretty arbitrary.

I purchased rijkt.link using Cloudflare after looking at cheaper but more sketchy options. This turned out to be quite practical, as I now host everything related to the website on a single provider.

Email

While I was at it, I also set up a custom email for this domain. This was relatively straightforward using Proton Mail, just had to add eight DNS records:

• TXT proof of ownership
• MX records for routing
• TXT Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for authentication
• CNAME DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) for keys
• TXT DMARC for verifying sender information

With that you're reading the words of the proud owner of [email protected].

CloudFlare

The resulting setup is quite simple. A CNAME entry points to an internal Cloudflare domain belonging to the Cloudflare Page. The internal domain is fronted by Cloudflare Proxy, which adds DDoS protection, metrics and the like.

  
architecture-beta


    service proxy(internet)[Cloudflare Proxy] 
    service static(server)[Static Web Server]
    
    proxy:R -- L:static

Zola

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust. It has many themes, Linkita is the one I'm using. It is based on Kita and adds multi-language support.

My reasoning for using Zola over more broadly supported alternatives mainly boils down to Zola using Rust. If I ever want to write an extension I would prefer using Rust over e.g. Ruby.

Repository Setup

The Git repo is easily created using zola init. For easier building, the theme is located inside the repository as well. Instead of a package management system, the install is done via Git submodules. To add a new submodule run

git submodule add <theme git repo> theme/<theme name>

When cloning the repository, the submodule has to be cloned as well. This is accomplished using the commands

 git submodule init
 git submodule update 

Versioning is handled with tags on the theme repository.

Deployment

At time of writing, Zola is no longer properly supported for Cloudflare Page's Git repository integration. Trying to deploy with the v2 build systems fails due to Zola being unavailable. Per the docs v1 still supports Zola, but only up to version 0.14.0. I'm currently running 0.20.0 locally. That version mismatch is a source of error's I'm not willing to debug if the worst comes to pass.

Automatic deployment via Cloudflare would have been convenient, but inverting the dependency here is nicer in practice. Therefore I simply deploy from a GitHub action. This still needs to be implemented at time of writing - coming soon.

Credits

Reading vale.rocks and gwern.net greatly inspired me to have a presence of my own on the web. Zola and Linkita allowed me to get something off the ground quickly.

Closing remarks

This is my first attempt at setting up something like this. For work I am more used to big enterprise applications with Single Page front-ends. So if you have any suggestions, feel free to write me at email at [email protected]. Maybe at some point I'll even have a comment feature.