Setting up the Blog

blog.lookingforgroup.social

Why am I creating a blog? I needed a way to provide context to the world for why we are doing things for the app while being separate from the app deployment cycle. Additionally, I plan to add content in the realm of community building and establishing friendships.

Spreading the word

I am not a big fan of social media in general, but getting the message out means that I've been engaging on major platforms spreading the word. The intent is that I can make some short videos on the social platforms with links back to the blog for more long form descriptions and allow search engines to find the keywords associated with the platform which may help with user adoption.

A different kind of website

Initial feedback for the application has been mixed. This is probably due to me not communicating the message well. There is a lot of nuance to the lookingforgroup.social platform as it has a lot of attributes like a dating app which requires a lot of user information because it is meant for building small intimate groups in your neighborhood. You don't want to make bad matches!

lookingforgroup.social is also not another social network, it is a tool to help you build community in your neighborhood by creating club around a common interest. There are plenty of places to chat and read people's "opinions" in discussion forums, but lookingforgroup.social is a tool when you need it allows you to find people and to be found by others.

The blog technology

I've opted to use the Zola framework to generate a static site. It seems to be working out just fine as evidenced by this posting. Zola has a templating and themes configuration so I was able to leverage a TailwindCSS and DaisyUI theme which matches what the main lookingforgroup.social website uses. Under the hood Zola is implemented in Rust and leverages libraries like pulldown-cmark which is being used already when creating announcement emails for all those lovely people that have that enabled in their profile. pulldown-cmark takes markdown files and outputs html. With all the familiarity with the existing technologies there was a lot less to learn. I'm pleased so far.

One minor issue

The software is packaged and executed within Docker containers. The only technical hurdle is that I had to modify the theme to use relative paths instead of absolute paths so that links would work when deploying the container locally and also when deploying the same container into production. I wrote up an issue with the maintainer, but until that is resolved (which I do not expect to ever happen because the internet seems to be built on unpaid individuals) I have to maintain an internal duplicate of some of the code. This is good enough for now.