How i came up with this blog

It all started when i was asked to do SNMP v3 queries from command line and i soon realized i wasn’t going to memorize something like this

i still struggle to memorize common OID numbers 🫠, forget about this

snmpwalk -v3 -u [user] -l authNoPriv -a md5 -A [community] [node] [oid]

So i decided to take a step into manage the knowledge i gain day by day in some form of structured documents, at that time i started using obsidian for my personal notes and i developed a system to host them as a website, that was perfect for the purpose and i created a vault and start to write down common bash loops or oneliners.

With time passing by i started to document my homelab adventures and pages started to look more and more like blog posts and so i decided to take a step forward and use it like an excuse to learn some new technology, i started to look into hugo, since i was familiar with go projects and markdown formatting and to avoid complex rewriting of my obsidian vault

The migration process

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So i started to watch at my already existing notes and reason about how to migrate from obsidian to this format, i first create an archetype for common blog properties:

title: '{{ replace .File.ContentBaseName `_` ` ` | title }}'
date: '{{ time.Now | time.Format "2006-01-02" }}'
draft: true
description:
tags:

Then i started to look for a template to avoid customizing manually CSS files and organize the look of the website from scratch, after some time i found this theme that was complete, simple and customizable, perfect for blog posts but allow also to directly manage CSS properties and custom layouts for non posts pages

Converting old notes

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One of the main problems with handling the migration was retrieving metadata for the old notes like creation date, luckily the repo was git managed and i could ask to git to get metadata for me 😉

# looping trough old notes
for file in **/*.md; do

  # getting first commit date for the given file
  d="$(git log --follow --format=%ad --date=iso  $file | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}')";

  # changing date property accordingly
  sed -i "s/date:.*/date: $d/g" "$HOME/projects/hugo_test/content/blog/$(basename $file)";
done

Migrate my portfolio

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Then after some time i decided to make this my personal website and migrate here my portfolio that at the time was an angular application a little too over engineered for a simple static webpage.

The angular components where acting as a view for data written in a SON file and applying some custom CSS to improve visual effect,JSON was used to decouple data from view logic to prevent situations like this where i want to recreate the view but keep the data as they where before

Automate!!!!

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The last thing to do was to automate deployment on Github pages with a simple action to build the website and make deployment operations

Conclusions

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I’m still experimenting with this blog as a way to relax and review my tech projects and reason about the technical decisions, the site has evolved from the idea of a place to write down oneliners and day by day things into a digital history log of my technical skills and opinions