This site now has a CMS

I’ve been trying to use social media less and this site more. The hope is to keep a more thorough, short-form log of stuff I’ve read, watched, made, eaten, thought about, etc. However, since the site is a Jeykll-backed static site, I previously had to be at my laptop to post a new entry.

While there are more sophisticated options for managing Jekyll sites, I really just wanted to simple webform to post a new entry which I could access from my phone.

After a few hours of hacking, I put together a simple FastAPI endpoint which performs the following operations:

• Accepts a title, list of categories, post body, an image or video, and an API key for security.
• Pulls the latest version of this site’s repo from GitLab.
• Resizes the image and/or video using ffmpeg
• Generates a jekyll-formatted markdown file and writes it to the appropriate directory.
• Commits the changes and pushes them back to GitLab.

Since this site uses GitLab CI to publish new changes, the new post shows up in 1-2 minutes.

Some things I’d like to add in the future:

• Auto-dithering of images to reduce page size like lowtech magazine. (On the note of reducing page size, there’s some pretty minimal Javascript running that uses JQuery which I could probably scrap).
• Add an “edit” button to each log entry so I can fix typos, or even have log entries that grow over time.
• Some sort of comment-via-email functionality? (this is half-baked).

Here are links to the form and the source code.