It’s a Dog’s Breakfast

It is what it is. Unless it ain’t.

First

This is my first post. It’s a pretty suckish one. But it is what it is.

I have created this blog using simple markdown text files and something called Hugo.

I am but a newbie when it comes to statically generated sites, but this is the gist of it (at least what I’ve learned in the last couple days):

  1. I write blog posts as simple separate markdown files.
  2. I run a command in the terminal to compile my post(s) into static html files.
  3. I push those static html files online.
  4. Voila. A very fast and simple blog.

The idea being that there is no database (and hence no database calls). It’s just static pages, so it’s fast.

What I’ve learned so far:

  • I like writing in Markdown. But I need practice. Lots of practice.
  • I created an Amazon S3 account years ago. I hardly ever used it. Turns out you can host a blog like this one on S3 - very cheaply. :-)
  • Creating a local blog using Hugo is dead simple. Literally, it only takes a few minutes.
  • It comes with a neat little server that will run locally to let you test your site in the browser. It’s just cool.
  • Automating the process of pushing those files to the cloud (in my case, to S3, but for many it might be github) is not so easy for a wannabe nerd like me. It’s not impossible. Just not super easy peasy.
  • There are quite a few nice pre-built themes you can apply.
  • Modifying and tweaking those themes looks to be challenging for someone like me. This is good. I need a challenge. It’s how I learn new things.
  • Hugo is relatively new. From the reading I’m doing, it’s similar to Jekyll, only a lot faster and a lot younger.
  • There are a lot of people hacking on it. That makes it fun to me. I’m hoping that hanging around the smart people will rub off on me a little.

And no, not everything I write about will be about Hugo. I intend to write much more often, and to do so, I have to be less worried about focus. It will be all over the place - hence the site name. (.xyz is for all the cool kids btw).

Watch this space. Just not too closely.

I haven’t even got comments up and running yet, but hopefully that will come. For now, if you want to chit chat about it, I’ll probably share these posts up on Google+, so lambaste me there.