I’ve wanted to do more with my website for a while, especially as I’ve become less active on social media. Abandoning Twitter altogether. In an era of endless feeds and brain rot, returning to ’the blog’ feels right.
My annual web hosting bill added up, and I eventually cancelled it. The old blog used WordPress, which offers a nice back-end for managing content, but a PHP server, a MySQL database, and the frequent WordPress updates were too much effort for my lazy bones.
I’ve since moved to Hugo, a static site generator. Assets are precompiled locally before deployment, and a GitHub repository can host the site. Simple and free. I’ll gradually move some of my old blog posts over.
If you’re on Windows, it takes just a few PowerShell commands:
winget install Hugo.Hugo
hugo new site my-website
cd my-website
hugo new content/posts/hello-world/index.md
hugo server # Starts a server at http://localhost:1313
Hugo’s local server provides hot reloading, so you can see changes without refreshing your browser. A hugo huge win.
Writing in Markdown is my main pleasure with it: simple, clean, and no WYSIWYG metadata cluttering the install. VS Code and most other IDEs can preview it, too.
One thing you learn as you get older: simplicity beats complexity. Big frameworks are fun; maintaining a pile of them is not.
I plan to share more of my work and write about Godot, the lil’ game engine that could, which rekindled my love for making games these days.
See you around, stranger. 👋