i gave my spare raspberry pi a job

I had a Raspberry Pi 3B+ sitting in a drawer doing nothing. That’s a crime really - so I decided to put it to work.

I’d been running my blog on Bear Blog, a minimal hosted platform that I genuinely liked. Clean, fast, no fuss. But I got curious - could I replicate that experience myself, at home, on a $50 computer that draws less power than a phone charger?

The build

In two days I went from a bare Pi to a fully self hosted blog running Hugo with the hugo-bearblog theme. Using Safari’s developer tools I was able to reverse engineer how my existing blog looked and replicate it nearly exactly. Same feel, same functionality - just running on hardware sitting on my desk.

What surprised me

What surprised me most wasn’t that it worked. It was how well it worked, and how fast. Hugo generates static files so the Pi barely breaks a sweat serving pages. The whole thing is lightweight by design.

What’s next

Once it was running I started to realise the possibilities. Subdomains. Reverse proxies. Self hosting images on Cloudflare R2. And then the big one - maybe I don’t need my current portfolio hosting provider either.

There’s something genuinely satisfying about owning your own little corner of the internet. No subscriptions, no platform risk, no one else’s rules. Just a tiny computer humming away at home, serving your words to the world.