How I built this blog

Every blog needs a first post, and the least original — but most honest — thing I can write about is the blog itself. So: here's what's holding this page up, and the one thing that fought me the whole way.

The stack#

It's a Zola site. One static-site-generator binary, no Node, no 400-package node_modules to audit. I write Markdown, Zola spits out HTML, and that's the whole content pipeline.

On top of it sits the Terminus theme, which gives me the dias@stas:~/blog $ terminal look for basically free. I swapped in my own errorno-dark palette and a custom stylesheet so it feels like mine and not a demo, but the bones are all Terminus.

Deploy is a GitHub Actions workflow: push to main, it builds the site and publishes it to blog.errornoslash.be. No server to babysit — the output is just files.

Editing without touching the terminal#

The part I actually wanted was to write posts without opening an editor and hand-writing TOML front-matter every time. That's where Pages CMS comes in. It reads a .pages.yml schema straight out of the repo, then gives me a proper form — title, slug, date, tags, a rich-text body — and commits the resulting Markdown back to GitHub for me. The post you're reading was written through that form.

The nice bit is that the CMS is just a view onto the repo. If it ever disappears, my posts are still plain .md files sitting in content/blog/. No lock-in, no export dance.

What broke#

Naturally, the friction wasn't the CMS or Zola — it was logging in.

Getting into Pages CMS means authenticating with GitHub, and I use a passkey stored in Proton Pass. On a Firefox-based browser (I'm on Zen), that handoff isn't automatic: Firefox routes the WebAuthn request straight to the OS platform authenticator, so instead of a nice Proton Pass popup I got the system's "Touch your security key" dialog and GitHub grumbling about "partial passkey support." The extension never got a look in.

The fix lives in about:config, and the annoying part on a declarative NixOS setup is making sure the pref survives a rebuild instead of getting reset the next time I switch. Lesson filed under "the login page is always harder than the app."

What's next#

Now that the pipeline works end to end, the plan is to actually use it: write-ups of the projects I've been building and the NixOS config I keep poking at more than is strictly necessary.

If you're reading this, the deploy worked. See you in the next one.