Add your blog to hullblogs.com

For many years, csblogs.com has aggregated posts from the blogs of current and past students of the University of Hull. Unfortunately, recently the site has started to generate random error messages. To fix this, Freeside (of which I'm the head, as it turns out) have decided to implement a replacement.

It looks rather cool if I do say so myself, so I thought I'd share it here. I'll talk first about how you can add your blog to it and why it's a good idea to start one yourself (and how you can do so for free!). Then, I'll talk a little bit at the end about how I built hullblogs.com and how it's put together.

@closebracket had the idea to call it hullblogs.com, and then I implemented the code for it:

(Above: A screenshot of hullblogs.com)

You can visit it here: hullblogs.com.

If you're a current or past student at the University of Hull, then you we want to hear from you! If you've got a blog (and even if you haven't yet!), then you can add your blog by going to hullblogs.com, and then clicking "add your blog".

If you don't yet have a blog, then we have you covered. Our guide has a number fo really easy ways to get started and host a blog for free! There are multiple ways to host a blog without paying a penny (no hidden charges after some time either).

But I don't have a blog!

If you're not convinced about setting up a blog and putting it on the Internet, there are a number of key reasons you should:

• It's not about other people reading it. By setting up a blog, you don't need to have 100s of views. What matters is that you write for you - not for anyone else.
• If only 1 person reads your blog, then it's worth it. You personal blog and/or website makes a great addition to your CV. It's a wonderful way of documenting the things you're doing and learning while doing your degree and beyond - and a great way for potential employers to find more detail on all this information in 1 place.
• Write for yourself. Personally, I find my blog a great place to post about difficult problems that I've encountered and solved. Then when I encounter a similar problem again, I can re-read my own blog post about it. Because I'm the one who wrote the post, I can anticipate what I may find confusing and explain that in more detail to help out future me.
• Improve your technical writing skills. Technical writing - the process of writing about complex technical subjects (whether this is Computer Science or beyond) is an invaluable skill. Writing documentation, communicating complex ideas, and helping others are all situations which can call for technical writing - and it's a great thing to put on your CV too. Just doing a thing isn't enough - being able to write about it and document it is really important when working for example on commercial (or even academic) work.

If you're not computer science oriented, then Wordpress, Blogger, or maybe Squarespace [unclear if squarespace is free or not] would be a a great place to start your blogging journey. You can host a blog for free too!

If you are computer science oriented (I'd guess most of the people reading this probably are given the kinds of posts I write for my blog here), then I strongly recommend Eleventy. It's a static site generator, and there are a whole bunch of ready-made templates for you to use to get started quickly.

In fact, hullblogs.com itself is built with Eleventy, using feedme to parse RSS/Atom feeds.

Every night, the site will be rebuilt. During this process, it will download the RSS/Atom feed from all the blogs registered, and order the posts chronologically. If an image is associated with a post, this will also be downloaded - the site also looks for the first image in a post's content if an image isn't explicitly specified to be attached to a blog. Once ordered, the posts are then paginated (split into multiple pages) and the rest of the site is rendered.

Being a static site, once the (re)build is complete hosting the site is simple and secure. Currently, Freeside hosts it using Nginx to statically serve it.

If your feed is malformed/contains errors or your blog is offline don't worry! hullblogs.com will transparently ignore your feed when it rebuilds. Then, once your blog is back up and running, it will add it back into the main hullblogs.com site the next night when it rebuilds again.

If you're interested in digging into the source code of the site, I've open sourced it on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 Licence: https://github.com/FreesideHull/hullblogs.com

If you've read this far, thanks so much for reading! We're after a better favicon logo for hullblogs.com. If you've got an idea, please do let us know by opening an issue.