Tech projects

The Cluster Chicken & Egg: How to Blog About a Server That Doesn't Exist

My entire goal for this project is to self-host everything, including the blog you're reading right now, on a Raspberry Pi 5 K3s cluster. That presents a small, hilariously meta problem: How do I blog about building the server when the server hosting the blog doesn't exist?

Jon DePalma

06 Nov 2025 — 2 min read

Table of Contents

My entire goal for this project is to self-host everything, including the blog you're reading right now, on a Raspberry Pi 5 K3s cluster.

That presents a small, hilariously meta problem: How do I blog about building the server when the server hosting the blog doesn't exist?

The Interim Solution: Hugo + Cloudflare

I turned to Claude for a recommendation on a temporary, down-and-dirty setup that I could spin up instantly. I wanted to be able to launch in a day, spend no money, and be able to migrate easily.

The winning combination was a static site generator and a global edge host: Hugo and Cloudflare Pages.

Hugo: This program generates static HTML/CSS and has a bunch of helpful features. This means there's no runtime environment or database needed–just files that can be served anywhere. I am using the PaperMod theme and with a small learning curve, I was up and running.
Cloudflare Pages: This service provides free, global hosting with automatic deployments from GitHub. I push a change to my repository, and Cloudflare handles the Hugo build and instant distribution to their CDN. I planned to use Cloudflare for my project, so my domains were already onboarded.

It's the perfect stop-gap: stable, fast, free, and gives me a custom domain right now. Once the K3s cluster is operational, migrating the content–which is all simple Markdown–to a self-hosted Ghost or other platform will be trivial. Bonus: I get some good practice writing in Markdown.

Build Resources: The PiCluster Repo

The interim blog is officially live, and so is the PiCluster build repository. As I progress through each phase I will post my design and build artifacts.

Follow along, fork it, and let me know your suggestions!

GitHub Resources

Grab Claude’s Hugo implementation plan which I used to set up this site: How I set up Hugo

Next up: We'll REALLY start flashing SD cards and wiring up the Pis.

Self-Sovereign Identity for the Agentic Age

Machine identities now outnumber human employees by a staggering 82 to 1. We are populating a digital workforce that operates at machine speed, without an effective way to provide scalable identity and security. My solution: The didlite decentralized self-sovereign identity utility.

Part 3: The Final Layer – Hosting Ghost & The Great Migration

The blog is live! My Pi Cluster implementation has been live and stable for two months. Ghost is configured and cut over to my production domain, and I’ve been actively developing applications.

Part 2: Services, Services, Everywhere!

The concept has become reality. I am hosting real services from a three-node Raspberry Pi cluster. I have traffic flowing through Cloudflare and routed to K3s services without needing to set up port-forwarding or complex router configurations.

Blogging with Google Gemini

Building a Kubernetes cluster on a stack of Raspberry Pi 5s is the technical grunt work. But turning my build into a readable blog series? That’s where the real creative pain starts. Turns out, I could continue my AI experiment, which is how my content planning partnership with Gemini took off.