A new home for my technical notes
I've started Kiwiii.Stream/blog as a place to document the technical projects I'm working on: home lab infrastructure, self-hosting, automation, smart-home experiments and the lessons that come from troubleshooting real systems.
The aim is to publish regularly, explain what I tried and what I learned, and build a useful record of projects as they develop.
Keeping the site simple
I wanted a lightweight site that I could maintain without needing a full content-management system. The content is stored as Markdown files in the GitHub repository, so articles can be edited, reviewed and versioned alongside the code that builds the site.
The repository includes a small Python build script. It reads the Markdown posts and their metadata, then generates the static website files, including an article list, individual article pages, styling and a JSON feed. This keeps the published site lightweight and means the writing remains portable plain text.
Each post has a few metadata fields, such as its title, date, summary, category and publication status. Drafts can stay in the repository with published: false; changing that field to true makes the post eligible for the next build.
Connecting the domain
The site is available at kiwiii.stream/blog, using a subdomain of my existing kiwiii.stream domain managed through Cloudflare.
Setting up a subdomain meant adding a separate blog DNS entry and connecting it to the site's Cloudflare-hosted destination. The important lesson was to use the hostname Cloudflare expects, rather than entering a full URL with https:// into a DNS CNAME target.
I checked the result in a browser after the DNS and hosting configuration was in place. Getting the address to respond was only one part of the job: the next step is making sure the correct site build is being served and that changes to the repository make it through to the live site.
Why this approach?
This setup gives me a few useful benefits:
- Version history: Git records changes to posts and site code.
- Portable content: Markdown files are easy to edit and can be moved to another platform.
- A static site: Pages can be served without running a database-backed content-management system.
- A repeatable build: The same script can generate the site locally or in a deployment pipeline.
- A dedicated address: The blog has its own subdomain while the main site remains at Kiwiii.Stream.
It also gives me a practical way to learn more about Git, deployment workflows, DNS and Cloudflare while building something I will actually use.
What comes next
The initial site is in place; now I can improve the layout, check the publishing workflow end to end and start documenting the projects themselves. I plan to review the previous week's work on Sundays and publish a post at 10 pm when there is something useful to share.
This is the starting point: a simple publishing setup that I can understand, maintain and improve as the home lab grows.
Visit the main site: Kiwiii.Stream · Read future posts: Kiwiii.Stream/blog