---
title: How This Site Works
categories:
  - technology
published_date: "2022-05-13 14:22:13 +0000"
layout: default.liquid
is_draft: false
---
# How This Site Works

Decided to just make a quick post to go over how this site is made and updated.

## Technical Stuff

I've gone through a few iterations, all the previous times I would just hand write HTML and CSS, which worked, but was annoying if I wanted to change stuff.

So this time I decided to switch to a static site generator, [Cobalt](https://cobalt-org.github.io/).
It's pretty nice, and written in Rust too.

It was kind of hard to figure out how to do some stuff, since the docs kind of suck.
But eventually I figured it out and now it works well.

Pages are Liquid templates (kind of like HTML), which I only need to edit if I want to change layout stuff, and I don't do that very often.

Styling is done with SCSS, which compiles down to plain CSS. It's *really* nice to work with, especially since I can keep stuff separated into different files.

## Updating

All the posts & pages are just written in simple Markdown, which makes it nice to write and edit just the content.

Once I've updated it, I simply run an rsync command to update it on both servers. I have a VPS I use for the main site (owned by one of my partners), and a Raspberry Pi 3 I use for the onion site mirror.

I also have it stored as a git repository, as a backup, and so that people can look at the code for reference.

To make a new blog post, I simply run `cobalt new "Name" -f posts`, and cobalt will create a new Markdown file for me, in the posts directory, with all the metadata.

I then open it up in Neovim, and start writing. At the end I'll enable spellcheck and fix the many mistakes I've made.

I can then run `cobalt publish posts/Name.md` and it'll rename the file, and add a published date to the metadata. I then just run the rsync command, and it's live on the site!