Hello.

My name is Andy, I build Apps and things for a living in the UK. This blog is where I’ll share a few thoughts and topics around tech, links I find interesting, and the occasional side project I create from time to time.

A few questions to get out of the way

Why "Tiny Wren"?

I love wrens. Their lovely round little bodies. Their oddly loud song. The absolute joy of seeing them bob around the garden between flower pots.

Perhaps a Tweet of the Day puts it best:

"[Their song] is the extrovert side of a normally introverted bird."

I’m a bit of an introverted bird myself — with a slightly round body.

What did you build this blog with?

I'm not a professional web developer, but I like to dabble. Here were my main requirements when choosing a platform:

1. Self-hosted

I want to control where I host my stuff. I want to own it — and be able to move it around if I choose to.

2. Avoid maintenance hell

In the past, I’ve used WordPress or some kind of Ruby-based platform. Frankly, it was a pain to maintain and a security nightmare.

These days, I don't want the hassle. I'm happy to skip more complex features (like comments or search) if it means less maintenance.

3. Fast

I despise slow, confusing, cumbersome websites that take forever to load. I want both the server and the site itself — HTML, JS, CSS — to be lightning fast.

4. Minimal JavaScript

I suck at JavaScript, and I want to keep it that way.

This is a blog, not a fancy web app. I don’t want to fight JS just to render something that HTML and CSS were built to handle.

5. Markdown-based writing

No WYSIWYG editors, thanks. I deal with enough of those at work in messy internal wikis.

Markdown is simple to use for me.

So what’s the setup?

Here’s what I ended up with:

Static site generator: Zola — simple, fast, and efficient.
Theme: Based on zola-minimal, with some custom edits.
Hosting: GitHub Pages — free, fast, and dead easy to update.
Domain: Cloudflare Domains — simple and flexible.

Thats enough for now, I will at some point add some way to contact me. But in good time I think.

15/04/2025