I'm a web developer from the Isle of Man now living in Australia. I build with Wordpress and Shopify, and also trying out Eleventy.
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I have an old MacBook Air 13" from 2019 which was my work horse for a while until I forked out for a new iMac last year. It comes in handy sometimes when I need to do work away from my desk but it's pretty slow so that's mostly limited to simple coding stuff.
Recently I've been adding self-hosting platforms to it - namely Jellyfin and other media-related treats.
A while back I came across Kavita, an ebook organisation platform in a similar vein to Jellyfin but for ebooks. I keep all my ebooks in a folder and occasionally sort through them using Calibre, which is great for tweaking metadata and all that.
I sync my local files with MEGA.io so everything is backed up, and I also share the local MEGA folder (the main sync is on my iMac) with the MacBook Air so it can access all the files. This is handy for both coding and ebook management.
So I've set Kavita up now and it has imported all my books. Some of the metadata is off so I'll need to do some tidying up in Calibre, but so far so good. I also set up the email-to-device config so if I add new ebooks to Kavita first I can then send them to my Kindle. Easy!
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We've had a Dell Inspiron laptop knocking around for a couple of years now and I've never known what to do with it.
One time I tried installing Batocera and then ChimeraOS on it to use as a console in the living room but got bored with the fiddling and it wasn't a good set up anyway.
I've recently come across ZorinOS and liked the look of it. It has been suggested for people moving from Windows, but ironically I found it more macos-like - especially after a few UI tweaks.
My daily driver is an M3 iMac and I use an old MacBook Air for some home server stuff, and when I need it I can use the Air for some dev work. It's a slow machine though and I don't like using it for that.
I'm hoping if I need to do work away from my desk now I can use this laptop instead.
Here's my desktop with Mac-style tweaks:
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I had a spare moment yesterday [sorry, a what?] so I jumped in with the most straight-forward looking option to try out - PagesCMS.
I have no affiliation with this platform so anything positive below is sincere and I will continue to review it as I use it as my CMS.
It was actually even easier than I expected to set up, although I did go with the hosted version rather than trying to host it myself since their instructions only cover Vercel and involve setting up a database, which I don't have time to manage at this point.
For those not aware - as I wasn't a few days ago - PagesCMS connects to your GitHub account and manages the flat files you have in there before they get built. It is also completely customisable in terms of what you can choose to edit since you point the CMS to the content, it doesn't take over or try to make you do things you don't want to. You can edit posts, but also any custom post types you have and single pages as well. Saving them will update your repository and in turn trigger a build of your site if you have that set up.
Once the initial account signup process is done (via GitHub) I am presented with a dashboard where I can see my current repository, add new ones, create a new project or even add another GitHub account.
The most important thing you need to do is add a config file. The docs are well written and even have an 11ty example config file to get you started.
My blog is based off the eleventy-base-blog-v8 so is a little out of date and honestly at some point I plan on changing it to something homemade - but that's getting off on a tangent. The downside here is that I wrote additional pieces of text content (such as the blurb on my homepage) like this:
module.exports = { description: "I'm a web developer based in Australia. I build with Wordpress, Shopify and now also Eleventy, sometimes mixing them all together.", }But in the config file it only likes JSON for this format, so 'description' doesn't auto-populate and is uneditable. I'm not sure if this was something I did for some reason, or if v8 of the blog did this and was changed for v9.
This also goes for my About page and site meta as well; it's not an issue as I'm not planning on changing these immediately, but worth noting for future reference.
Another issue I ran into was getting my post tags working. I like the way these work in Eleventy, generating a post list for each tag and wanted to be able to edit these easily in the CMS too. After searching the GitHub issues page I came across the answer, which it turned out was also in their docs all along. Here's the important part of my config file covering the posts:
content: - name: blog label: Blog type: collection path: 'content/blog' filename: "{fields.title}.md" view: fields: [ title, description, date, tags ] fields: - name: title label: Title type: string - name: description label: Description type: string - name: date label: Date type: date - name: tags label: Tags type: string list: true fields: - name: tag label: Tag type: string - name: body label: Body type: rich-textIn this config I added:
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'filename' - I added this in because I like to use the title as the post slug. In Obsidian I was doing this manually in the frontmatter so it's nice to automate it. You can also use variables like {year} to build a slug.
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fields > name: tags - this got my tags in place by using the 'list' field type. It will then repeat the fields within for each entry, so here I just have a single text field for each tag.
However, although this creates a nice interface for adding new tags and correctly adds the tags frontmatter to my post, the build fails each time and I cannot figure out why.
This is how the tags selection should look in the CMS, but unfortunately when I add any tags it breaks the build:
If I can get this working it will mean I can keep adding tags, the only downside is I can't see tags I've already added to reuse but I tend to write them off the cuff anyway. Also in the config you can have min/max settings to limit these options as well.
This is my first post written using PagesCMS (and that above is my first embedded image in the entire blog so fingers crossed) so we'll see how it goes, but I would like to get my tags working.
I mentioned earlier about changing my blog theme and having a functional CMS has made me think about how I want to redo that as well, but I also need to figure out what I want from this blog too.
If you are currently manually editing your markdown files for your Eleventy blog and want an easier way to handle things, give it a shot. I'll try and keep updates on using it and any issues I may run into.
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