Resonating article from Mike Grindle about personal blogging and how it fits into todays Internet: Why Personal Blogging Still Rules

Before the social media craze or publishing platforms, and long before ‘content creator’ was a job title, blogs served as one of the primary forms of online expression and communication.

Everything on your blog was made to look and feel the way you wanted. If it didn’t, you rolled your sleeves up and coded that stuff in like the webmaster you were. And if the masses didn’t like it, who cared? They had no obligations to you, and you had none to them.

Hiding beneath the drivel that is Google’s search results, and all the trackers, cookies, ads and curated feeds that come with them, personal blogs and sites of all shapes and sizes are still there. They’re thriving even in a kind of interconnected web beneath the web.

The blogs on this small or “indie” web come in many shapes and sizes. […] But at their core, they all have one characteristic in common: they’re there because their owners wanted to carve out their space on the internet.

Your blog doesn’t have to be big and fancy. It doesn’t have to outrank everyone on Google, make money or “convert leads” to be important. It can be something that exists for its own sake, as your place to express yourself in whatever manner you please.

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To automate some of the deployment steps on my personal server, I needed a tool which can be triggered by a webhook and does execute some pre-defined commands.

A classic solution for this would be to have a simple PHP script with a call to system(...). But I don't have PHP installed on the server itself and wanted this to be more lightweight than a full Apache+PHP installation.

Thus exec-hookd was born. It is a small Go daemon which listens to HTTP POST requests and runs pre-defined commands when a matching path is requested.

Its configuration lives in a small JSON file, which lists the port to listen on and the paths together with their commands to execute:

{
  "Port": 8059,
  "HookList": [
    {
      "Path": "/myhook",
      "Exec": [
        {
          "Cmd": "/usr/bin/somecmd",
          "Args": [
            "--some",
            "arguments"
          ],
          "Timeout": "5s"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The commands are called with a timeout after which they are stopped to avoid that things hang around forever.

Ralf tooted a nice and tidy git log output alias for the console: