This is the first post on my new blog. I’ll be writing about various unrelated
things that happen to interest me at the time. This blog used to be on
WordPress, then Jekyll hosted on Github pages, and this iteration uses
Hugo and AWS for hosting. I believe I’ll stick with Hugo
and AWS for some time as I’ve never enjoyed a CMS and hosting setup as much as
this.
Hugo is a pleasure to use due to its speed and flexibility. It works wonderfully
for a minimalist blog like this, as you might expect, but I’ve also been able to
build something with a slightly more complex
structure, and can see that Hugo could
easily handle far more complexity than that. It’s also been great reading the
Hugo source code, as recently I’ve become more
and more interested in Go.
As with most static site generators, another joy of using Hugo is that I get to
work on my content as files in markdown. Using Sublime Text with its speed and
rich feature set to edit aesthetically pleasing text files is a world away from
battling with WordPress’ WYSIWYG over a Web interface (like Jeff
Atwood, I’ve
never been a fan of WYSIWYG). It’s also great to be able to keep all my content
in version control and easily use Unix command line tools on it etc.
I also love static sites because it’s so easy to optimise them for speed. Fast-
loading web pages are satisfying, and having static content gives you a huge
advantage on that front. It’s also easy to add other optimisations like
minification and gzip, as well as hosting it from a CDN. This blog uses all of
those, as well as having a very minamalist theme (< 50 lines of css so far).
Because of all this, I’ve already got two sites (a Chinese
grammar site and a Chinese learning
blog) on this setup, and am considering
moving my first site to it as well.
As for this one, I just need to get a commenting system set up, and produce more
content :)
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