To Hu or To Go?
Hugo is a really neat and fast static site generator ideal for making blogs I think.
The documentation for Hugo really did not help me, I had to watch someone use it. For me, the documentation lacked a good structure on how to actually make a custom static website with generated content! I felt it was bit obtuse and separated the content from how to do anything, hence a video series really helped me dig my heels in and get started. I do not even want to mention the version hell that Hugo suffers from where every blog or Q/A post links to different docs or has different answers. Hugo has really gone through a lot of churn but it is in a really great place now.
The Blog
Making a static website for yourself can be a fun endeavor none the less and with a little bit of suffering I have a deployed site on an AWS EC2 instance that I “rent” every month.
As of this post I am building my Hugo blog with version v0.111.3 on Debian (usually).
Generally, when I do any project with a cloud service provider (like a self hosted website), I think about the infrastructure first.
To me that means I put on my DevOps hat and:
- Write some
Terraformto deploy the resources that I need - Write some bash scripts (or maybe use something like
Ansible) to install things I need - Develop some sort of mechanism to expedite local development / testing
Hugo, really turned out to be helpful for converting Markdown into HTML which was a feature I needed to have in a site generator. Admittedly, I was a bit flustered with the various versions of Hugo’s content layout and that caused some problems but after putting in the time to truly understand my markdown layouts I felt better.
The hardest part of this project was actually remembering how to use basic HTML and CSS files, as well as write my own format (thank you Nord for the color theme).
Conclusion
I could go into details on all of this, I really just wanted to get a basic post up to see how it would render. I hope to post many more interesting things to come!
Thank you for your time!