I started this site as a creative outlet for my passions. Aside from coffee, the envrionment, transport issues and my family, I am also interested in technology, language and writing, all of which may feature in articles.

As a self-confessed coffee snob, I chose the name “The Coffee Machine” as a homage to my favourite drink. I also review cafes on Beanhunter under the same alias.

I drink black coffee only - short, long, ristretto, cold drip - just so long as it doesn’t contain milk. I prefer darky/nutty/chocolately flavours, rather than light/fruity/floral.

Site Construction

The site is built using Hugo, a static website generator and then hosted on AWS. I chose the Story theme as I like the clean lines and nice formatting features it gives.

I typically write blog articles on my iPhone using Bear. This allows me to write articles whenever I have a bit of free time - on the train, on a coffee break - and also allows me to easily link in photos which I’ve taken on my iPhone.

Bear supports Markdown and articles can be exported to the iCloud in their entirety (including images and other files), so it was relatively easy to automate pulling them down to my Mac, applying some scripted changes and then generating the HTML pages in Hugo.

All Hugo settings, scripts, articles and other material are versioned in Git, allowing me to recreate the site in the event my Mac or iPhone are lost/stolen/broken.

Images are either my own, or sourced from Unsplash or Pexels, which are both free stock photo sharing sites. Unless credited, images are all my own and are copyrighted as such. Please contact me if you would like to use an image from the site.

Maps on the site are created using uMap and OpenStreetMap. I wrote an article on adding maps to Hugo with uMap and OpenStreetMap, if you are interested to know how they are done.

The website coffee cup icon is courtesy of Pixel Perfect.