New website and blog

So I have decided it’s finally time to try some new things and went for a (hugo)[https://gohugo.io/] based website. So far this seems like a good choice.

This post will be updated with more technical choices regarding hosting and building of this site

I had to get live with a site in a rushed manner, so had to go with some quick decsions, and so far I like those. Having already a DNS I owned for a while made some things easier, other than that, there are many options available for free website hosting in 2022.

Needing something that I can update frequently and won’t have to maintain, I started thinking. Those thoughts made WordPress and similar options not something I would want. I mean - just the thought of having to maintain versioning for multiple hosting parameters (god forbid i’ll take a managed service :))

At work, Somewhere in the last few months we started experimenting with hugo as a template engine for some internal stuff, so I started digging into that.

Bingo.

And oh man, Just skimming through the available themes I found some stuff that I would definitely want as a website. I opted to go for the cactus theme as it seemed quite nice.

So now that I know what I want and how will it look, it was time to actually make it live. There are many options available here, I could have created a github action to push the hugo output to block storage (i.e. S3) and host it from there.

But come on - it’s 2022. My obvious choice was to use something such as GitHub pages, but I watned something a little more robust with more stuff to play with and something that is closer to larger scales (a learning opportunity)

So I decided to go for a cloudflare free account, they have quite the offering One of the latest features cloudflare offer is something called cloudflare pages (see here).

Using cloudflare pages I simply had to link a GitHub repo, provide the instructions on building the site (hugo) and pages took care of the deployment and hosting.

I think I had the whole thing up and running in less than 30 mins and without running apt-get once. I did have to read some documentation on how to run hugo properly in pages, as the default hugo version used in there is 0.54, and my theme required 0.55. But that was a simple matter of telling pages to use hugo 0.98.0 by adding the env var HUGO_VERSION.

From there, development should be a breeze, and a deploy is just a matter of pushing to the main branch (and it gets updated in less than a minute, nice!)

Having cloudflare as host is interesting as the site is served on one of the largest CDNs and is now DDOS protected. I also got an ich i’ll probably give workers and R2 a try some day, hopefully by then workers will support go-lang (although rust is a nice option too, gotta hate love the move checker)