Website: Care and Feeding

Because documenting the documents.

Intro

Hello! This is a short article about how this site was built and deployed. I learned a lot on the way, and while I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means hopefully this helps push someone over the edge into hosting.

Design and Build

First, I didn’t want to write raw HTML/CSS/JS. I don’t do that stuff by trade and learning the finer points of it seemed like too much trouble. Enter Hugo, a static site generator. This scratched multiple needs for me:

  1. Avoid a dynamically generated site
  2. Reduce dependencies on outside environments
  3. Have a truly portable site which is light on resources

Hugo is immensely flexible when it comes to templates. The possibilities are near endless, and while I’m currently using Hugo Coder with some alterations I’m planning on reducing the footprint even more (including removing any external website dependencies (fonts/javascript/etc)). There’s a lot to be said for a simple website which just works.

Deploy, Hosting, and DNS

Now that I could easily browse my site via localhost I needed to get it out there! I decided to use GitHub Pages as a hosting provider of sorts. Future plans include migrating to a separate hosting provider but maintaining the structure and build of the site. Updating my site is as easy as pushing a new commit! DNS is handled via Namecheap and a single ALIAS record. Mail is handled via Fastmail. To make deploying things easier, I built a script to build & deploy everything. Now to just get some more things out of draft…