Each HTML document consist of two basic building blocks: a head and a body. The body contains the actual content while the head consists mainly of meta information. Meta information helps the browser to display the body content in the most appropriate way. Furthermore, it helps other machines to make sense of your page. Machines can be search engine robots or social media platforms like Twitter or Mastodon. When you post a link there, the platform tries to display some preview information like a picture and a short summary.

The domain is connected to the (virtual) server, the web server software is idling for requests. So finally, we are ready to write our content, aren’t we? Not quite. We still lack the basic HTML that structures our content. Otherwise, we might just hand out plain text and that is something nobody likes. Plain text tends to be hard to parse for machines and for humans, as well (kind of).

With a domain and a (virtual) server the foundation is ready, and we can start to serve some basic HTML to our readers. Therefore, we need a web server - meaning a software that can talk to browsers that call our domain. I went with Caddy 2, which is a rather new web server written in Go. The nice part of caddy is that it was developed with encryption via https in mind.

The plan for today was writing about the setup of my caddy web server. However, a wild private message appeared on Mastodon and asked me: why does your blog lack an RSS feed? Good question why did it? And what could I do about it? Asking for an RSS feed was an excellent question for several reasons: I knew many people at mastodon like RSS and organize the blogs they follow via feeds.

As outlinde in the last post, having a server that is reachable by a custom domain is very nice. However, having a server and having a blog are still two different kettles of fish. One needs at least some kind of web server that hands (preferably) HTML files to each visiting browser. Good, web server software is free and plentiful. HTML is easy to write even with the dumbest text editor.

When you want to host your own blog there is a bunch of ingredients you will need. While you can always go more low level (wanna write an own web server?) the general parts are somewhat fixed. You will need a domain, a server, a web server and some content. Oh, and you need to wire it all together, because each part on its own is as helpful as an unassembled Ikea shelf.