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Motivation I have long been looking for a proper solution to handle all my document needs. Luckily I do not get that much actual paper mail any more, but I still struggle with proper digitalisation. Until now, I used the excellent Microsoft Lens App for Android to scan important mail and store it in a OneNote document on OneDrive. This has served me well, since OneNote also by default allows for OCR-based search, but it is lacking more sophisticated ordering techniques, making it hard to keep a clean structure. Recently, i came across the Paperless-ngx project, a refresh of the older, no-longer-maintained Paperless-ng. Paperless is a sophisticated and open source document management solution with a proper web frontend, OCR support, self-learning tagging capabilities as well as integration with mobile apps and E-Mail accounts. In this post, I will describe my local setup. Further posts will highlight some additional integrations I use as well as how I securely access it from outside. Let’s get started. My Home Server Setup My home server is a simple Intel Core i3 machine running Windows 10 and dating back to my student years of 2011. I mainly use it as a backup storage and media server machine, using Windows’ Storage Spaces as a software RAID with a few HDDs which are continually backed up using Backblaze Personal Backup. As media server I use the always-great Plex. I used to run a Windows Server instance and played with some virtualization, but in the end, it was not worth the hassle and extra cost (Backblaze Personal Backup does not support server OSes)....

Like most developers, I guess, I planned - and started, with multiple attempts - to create a personal site since like forever. But I never really got around to publishing something, since I wanted that page to look decent - and I’m just not a designer. Selecting Azure Static WebApps and Hugo Today, after spending some of my day fiddling with Azure Static WebApps, I preserved enough motivation to start reading up on the state of static site generators in 2022. I had read about Hugo before, but never really tried it. After having a look around their free themes overview, I found a decent one with PaperMod and went to try it. Hugo really is a blast to get started with, within minutes, actually. I also managed to set up a simple Azure DevOps YAML pipeline to automatically build and deploy the site - I need that comfort if I want to keep up some hope that this will receive additional posts. The future So yeah, here it is. Let’s see if I will actually use it and post something here from time to time - but I won’t promise that. Maybe I’ll get some motivation from somewhere 😆