Welcome

Hello World, this is my first blog.

So this is my website. For a while now I been meaning to get online with a personal website. Maybe so some blogging, maybe share my projects, but the reality is I’m paying £5 month for a VPS and I wanted to actually use it. So here we are.

Building a website

So… I’m actually a software developer, I spent more time building out restful apis and backend services. Sure I can throw a crud frontend using vue or blazor, but a website? No. This is something new. So where do I begin.

First Steps and Failures

HTML Templates

My first step was to find a free to use and open source HTML template for my personal website. I founds loads, it was simply the case of downloading and editing the HTML. Don’t get me wrong, it looked good. But the second I started adding more pages and thought up of the idea of using a blog, things got messy quickly. So I abandon the project.

Vue

My second attempt was using the tools I’ve become accustom too, vuejs. I stared out with a blank project and slapped vuetify on to make things pretty. After a few hours, the site looked a bit sorry for it’s self. Really sad really. The site looked ugly and blocky. I tried downloading a use based personal template, but it was a pain to manage.

Word Press (and others)

So my third attempt was to use CMS (Content Management Systems). tldr; this didn’t much further than me creating my first blog and making a few pages. Nothing against WordPress and the likes, but I found the UI difficult to navigate and I spent more time reading the docs than I did writing content / making the site pretty.

Hugo (static website generators)

Not long after giving up I watched a video from The Cherno, a youtuber who’s writting a game engine.

My Favourite Way To Make Websites

Before this video, I’ve not really looked into static website generators, but seeing how easy Hugo was for Cherno, I decided to give it ago.

Hugo has hundreds of free templates for different types of websites. I got stuck in and given them ago.

This is where I found not all templates were created equally. I found many websites required additional dependecies or having the dreaded npm package management with the horrors that is packages.json. I found a lot of these templates a nightmare to setup, thankfully for every 3 templates that were hard to setup and work with. At least one was as easy to run as typing hugo server in the terminal.

I setting on my template and not looked back.

Here we are.

I’ll most likely add this process to my projects page with some implementation details or have a follow up blog on Hugo. But for now I have to go, I need to pick my kids up from school in a moment.