Website
Creating my blog has been at the back of my mind for quite some time and I finally decided to get started.
To keep my setup as low friction as I could I decided to use Hugo for generating the structure of the website. I would like to focus more on the content, and at least for now having a read-to-use option is awesome.
The setup is really straightforward. Following the official Getting Started in a few minutes you can already have a good enough understanding of how to create a new article. The only choice to make is the theme, all the rest comes battery included.
After browsing themes.gohugo.io for around 60s I found a theme I like: PaperMod. Looks pretty nice to me: minimal look, has night mode, that’s it. Looks like it has quite a lot of features, but for now I’ll just stick to the defaults.
Hosting
Hugo’s guide page mentions a lot of options for deploying/hosting the website. Actually, all of them are straightforward, basically deploying the website is just a matter of coping the files generated in the/public.
In the end, I chose Netlify , having a flow completely based on git is super straightforward and ensures that the articles are properly tracked in the version control system. The free plan looks more than enough for starting out.
Once again Hugo’s documentation is great, within a few minutes, I gave access to Netlify to my GitHub repository, and now when I push to main the deployment pipeline starts and deploy the website automatically.
I wanted to get my own domain, it kind of feels way more personal. After a quick search on websites shared in this reddit thread:
I’ve seen that the price is not that different from Netlify’s solution. So, once again, trying to keep everything as simple as I can I purchased it from Netlify for around 4 USD for the first year, less than 20 USD after that. Connecting the website and the domain is fuss-free, and everything happens automatically, after paying of course. In a few minutes the website is already reachable with the new domain name.
And that’s pretty much it! There are a few things that I would like to improve, like having a seamless way to write my articles within Obsidian, while I still prefer to manage the project (when changing configuration, committing/pushing, etc) from visual studio code, but I guess this is already a great start and I am super happy with this setup.