Do what others do⌗

It was about time that I created a website for myself. Many professionals in this field have one and I could see the value in having a streamlined place to showcase what I’m doing. However, I wanted to create something extensible that didn’t require a heavy framework overhead like React. After all, this was going to be a personal website and not a web app. That’s when I came across Hugo.

Hugo as a workflow⌗

Hugo is great for building static websites. This was perfect since I didn’t really need to load data dynamically or run any fancy JavaScript. Hugo is also very lightwieght and available on differnt Operating Systems which was great since I also do some work on windows machines.

The major selling point for me however, was the workflow that Hugo provides. Simply put, you use a simple command like hugo new /<category/<title>.md and you automatically have your content organized in categories (since Hugo uses directorties to denote categories).

Additionally, you can have your entire local repo pushed to Github and have a runner publish your site for you. In the case of my website, the content is hosted on GitHub pages through a custom GitRunner workflow. This means I can push content files directly to github from anywhere and have my website recompile on the fly. This makes it very easy to publish content since you only really need to create a .md markdown file.

Should you use Hugo?⌗

Well, if you need simple static webpages - Hugo seems like the easiest to use. With its large collection of themes (shoutout to Panr for this theme) that are easily modifiable, its a great choice if you need a blog or a personal website.