A poll I ran on Mastodon recently forced me, against my will, to attempt an install of Arch Linux again.

...Multiple hours of frustration later...

Here's how to install Arch the easy way.

1. Download and make a bootable USB of the Arch Linux ISO.
2. DON'T FOLLOW THE INSTALL GUIDE.
3. Boot into the USB and run iwctl and follow these instructions to connect — basically device list, station <device> scan, station <device> get-networks, station <device> connect <SSID> — you can tab-complete devices and SSIDs.
4. (OR simply plug in an ethernet cable.)
5. Run archinstall and follow the prompts.
6. Hit "Install" then run reboot when it's done.

That's it. You're done. You have a working Arch Linux install.

Of course, it won't actually do much just yet, but it's a start. Here's a good place to continue your journey: https://wiki.archlinux.org.

Good luck out there!

There are a few static site generators out there, like Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, 11ty, Pelican, Hexo, Nikola, Metalsmith, Middleman, etc. I chose Zola to power this blog because it's simple, super speedy, easy to customise, and written in Rust.

Much of the frustration fun in running your own blog is the setup, so here's probably the quickest and dirtiest guide to getting a blog up and running with Zola and hosting it with Surge.

Prerequisites:

1. A computer.
2. Some command-line knowledge.

First, install Zola by running brew install zola (if you have Homebrew installed) or by following the Zola install instructions here.

After installing Zola, create a new site with zola init myblog, answer the install questions (we're using Surge so pick a base URL like: https://<subdomain>.surge.sh, this can be changed later), and then cd myblog.

Then choose a theme here and follow the install instructions. Mostly it's something like git init and then git submodule add <theme url> themes/<theme name>. For example:

git init # if you haven't already
git submodule add https://github.com/pawroman/zola-theme-terminimal.git themes/terminimal

Then add theme = "terminimal" (or your theme name) to your config.toml file and change any other relevant settings.

Create a Markdown .md post in the content directory like this. For example, content/2023-11-12-hello-world.md:

+++
title = "Hello, World!"
date = 2023-11-13

[taxonomies]
tags = ["hello", "world"]
+++

Hello, World!

To preview locally run zola serve and build your static site with zola build

To deploy, make sure Surge is installed with npm install --global surge (assuming you have a recent version of Node.js) and then push your public dir up using:

surge public <subdomain>.surge.sh # replace <subdomain> with your subdomain

NOTE: Set your base_url to in your config.toml file, eg. base_url = "https://<subdomain>.surge.sh" before you deploy.

You could also use Netlify or Github Pages or Cloudflare or whatever you want, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, that's it. Enjoy your static site!