As you can see I have a new website now. I’ve always wanted to have a blog where I could talk about my projects with a hope that maybe someone will get interested. If no one gets interested at least I won’t bother my friends with things they probaly don’t really care about :)
The Journey
At first glance it might seem like this website is a typical Hugo generated website and it’s true but that has not always been the case. Before I finally decided to use Hugo, I’ve been considering those 3 options:
- Make a website on my own using React
- Use Jekyll
- Use Hugo
And I’ve tried every single one of them before I decided to stick to Hugo.
First came Jekyll
I can’t remember where but somewhere while looking for nice Jekyll websites I came across the Chirpy theme made by Cotes Chung. I instantly loved it, just take a look at it:
And it’s got the archive timeline - Just as I imagined:
I immediately thought that’s what I’ll go with and even downloaded Jekyll to test it but then as I was scrolling through the Chirpy github repo I noticed how many people have used this theme so far:
21.3k and still growing. I definitely didn’t want to use such a common template. I think of my website as of a business card, the idea of having the same business card as 21k+ people didn’t seem too appealing.
Then came the idea of making my own website
I thought that making my own website shouldn’t be that hard. I wasn’t wrong… until it was time to make the blog. Turns out that making a fully functional markdown blog that works fast while being reliable for the author (me) is complicated. Who whould’ve thought ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s the website right before I started to work on the blog.
I was trying not to think about all the problems I’ll need to face while making it all on my own. I managed to make a fairly well working blog post interface. I was able to display .md files by supplying the file’s name in the website’s url: gamewin221.github.io/blog/{blog_post_name}.
That’s the moment when I wanted to add the functionality of displaying all public blog posts in the Blog page. Sounds easy right? Turns out that you cannot access the filesystem require('fs') if you use React. That ruined everything and it was exactly at that time when I decided to switch to Hugo and let it do the heavylifting for me.
And finally there’s Hugo
At first Hugo seemed a bit overwhelming to me but over time as I learned more about it - It was the best option for me, a modern alternative to Jekyll.
As you can see the website is fully operational now and I guess not much will change here for a long time. I’ll just write blog posts and my personal little corner of the internet will grow.