Updating the Server After almost 3 years - and with Ubuntu 24.04 around the corner - I thought it is about time to take care of my server updates. The following updates where executed: Ubuntu from 20.04 to 22.04 (last LTS to current LTS) update NodeJS 14 (😱) to NodeJS 21. I cannot remember why I even installed node in the first place. But might be handy if I ever come back to use VitePress update Go 1.

WebHook == Run Some Command A webhook is a an HTTP endpoint that triggers ‘some action’. The action will be specific for the application that provides the endpoint. In my case the action/endpoint will update my blog. Let’s ignore for a moment how exactly ‘updating the blog’ works, and just pretend I want to execute some arbitrary command on my server as soon as I call some very specific URL.

GitHub Actions are Fun… … but it can be a bit slow sometimes. Lately, I experienced total build times of ~10 mins for my very simple blog. This is annoying when I want to fix a small typo (which happens quite often). Even on a good day the build on GitHub takes ~1 min. In contrast, on my local machine a new post is build in less than 1 sec. How is this possible?

After reading this Toot from Surendrajat I wanted to add Mastodon Toots as comments. Thanks @carl for inventing the smart comment solution and sharing the required JavaScript / Hugo integration. Original source: Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon If you want to see how it all comes together, check out these git commits add required code toot add toot ID to this post

How I deploy my blog. Just dropping the link to the tutorial here, because the original article already explains it in great details. Deploy a static site with GitHub Actions All thanks to zartman.xyz Notes to Future Me Have 2 secrets in the github blog repo: DEPLOY_KEY - this is the private key of the server KNOWN_HOSTS - in my case it is the output of 1 2 ssh-keyscan ghostletters.

Problem Description Since I try to keep some online identities separate, I often stumble into problems like “Which email alias did I use for this service?” This time a new problem popped up when I created a second GitHub account. I want to git push via SSH key and each account should have its own key (not sure why, but it feels correct). Solution Gist: Create a ssh config file that references different keys for different hosts.