I’ve probably tried making my own website a dozen times in the past. Maybe more. I’ve probably tried every possible technology in some shape or form over the years…
PowerPoint
Good god. Powerpoint. ICT GCSE as a weird time, and I’m convinced this was just so our teacher didn’t have to bother teaching us how to make a .txt document into .html
Wordpress
I actually did have a fun time hacking together some fancy javascript to make this map working, but as you can see from the screenshot, I never got it to look… not shit, the moment you try and make the layout responsive.
You do not want to look at the rest of the code. It’s cursed. Along with the rest of Wordpress honestly.
Wix
Buggier, more sluggish and less configurable than wordpress, all while contributing to Genocide. What more could you want?
Javascript frameworks (yuck)
I don’t think I ever got anything decent working here lmao. Because what you want when you’re trying to make a blog is a gigabyte of NPM packages and hours sifting through boilerplate just to fail to get the example project running!
Straight up rawdogging it
What’s the absolute opposite of overengineered Javascript frameworks? Overengineering your own javascript framework!
Blazor
I had a lot of fun with this, but I cannot in good conscience let anyone knowingly use C#. I can’t, I won’t.
Flutter
I like Flutter, I would even say I love Flutter, but it’s just not a website or blogging platform, at least without far too much tinkering.
Enter Hugo
I quite literally searched “static site generation” and picked the first one that I thought was cool. I’m a big fan of only needing markdown for everything, and how quickly I was able to get it working on github pages.
I found PaperMod which made the setup process even better – I’ve already got cross-site search and a beautiful default theme, all without having to bother with much beyong some YAML configuration.
Despite spending a lot of my time complaining about the customisability of Wordpress, Wix, etc., I don’t think I actually mind having no control over my theming – I just don’t like having no control, or having to pick between a bunch of insanely ugly themes. Hugo themes are beautiful, and being atop of Hugo means you can dive in and muck around with the HTML and CSS if you want – but you don’t need to.
Even better is the setup – I installed the Snap package
sudo snap install hugo
Created a new hugo project
hugo new site quickstart && cd quickstart && git init
Added the papermod theme (some recommend using Golang’s modules, some just install it manually with git)
git submodule add --depth=1 ... themes/papermod
Added a new article
hugo new content/posts/my-first-post.md
And now I can host it with
hugo server -D (-D for showing drafts)
There’s something so nice with how straightforward things are with Hugo – because the workflow was designed for people who want to make websites, not tacking together a dozen different general-purpose technologies in the hopes of making a website by chance.
It’s got its limitations, like how I can’t bulk-update post templates, but you don’t need that for the most part. We’ll see.
Good job, Hugo! pat pat