How fmkc.fi was built
For years, I hosted information about old FMKC (Finnish Mechanical Keyboard Community) events on olli.works, but as the number of events grew, I realized my site was no longer the right place for them. These should have their own dedicated site, which led to this quick project of setting up a site with free hosting.
fmkc.fiThere had been many discussions about creating a fmkc.fi website or docs to host important information, as well as niche topics relevant to the Finnish community (like keycap NorDe support), but there always seemed to be a reason not to pursue it or to stop using solutions like a Hugo Docs site managed with ForestryCMS.
I had enough of hosting the content on my own site, so I decided to just do it—and hopefully this encourages others to help out as well.
The stack
As I was familiar with Astro from building this site, I came across a version specifically made for docs pages that promised easier setup: Astro Starlight. So here was the stack for this project:
- Astro Starlight
- Catppuccin theme for Starlight
- Github Pages
Nothing more, nothing less, just a simple setup, maybe some custom CSS and all the content in markdown files.
StarlightCatppuccin theme
Setting things up
Starlight was a breeze to get working, and since we were using a template, there were no major issues. I did, however, add some custom CSS tweaks to make the templates look a bit nicer, but nothing major.
Perhaps the largest task was importing all the data by hand. At the time of writing, there were 17 meetups to document. Thankfully, I had information on most of them from my own site, but many of the image album links had broken, so I had to contact various people to host the photos elsewhere instead of on Imgur.
End result
The final site is simple yet clean and gets the job done. I’ve also managed to encourage other members to make pull requests, so I don’t have to maintain it all by myself.
