Update: I’m now using netlify for hosting

The first half of year 2020 is awful. It looks like the second half might be even worse. So I thought I’d better do something, at least make a change for myself. I’m going to start a personal blog.

As a tech guy, I didn’t start writing right away. Instead, I did some research on different personal web site platforms and technologies. Eventually, I chose hugo.

hugo is a static site generator. There are many free hostings for static web site. For everyone, it’s a good start with low cost.

Talking about static site generator, there are quite a few players in the field. The idea is based on a concept called Jamstack: Javascript, APIs and Markup. The popular ones can be found at staticgen, name a few here: gatsbyjs, next.js, hugo and jekyll.

hugo is simple, fast and written in go. I don’t need a fancy Javascript framework for my personal writtings. gatsbyjs is powerful but I don’t need most of the extended features. I may consider it for a product or company web site.

For hosting, I’m using render for now. There are many other available. I’ll see how it goes.

Adding a custom domain took longer than I expected. Google domains doesn’t support CNAME flattern or ALIAS. So I switched to cloudflare as my main DNS for dzhg.dev. Also, it took about 15 minutes to generate the certificates for my domain.

Overall, the experience was straightforward. I can focus on the content and writings not the setup or maintenance of the web site.

Below were all the commands I needed:

brew install hugo

mkdir ~/sites/dzhg.dev
cd ~/sites/dzhg.dev

git init
git remote add git@github.com:dzhg/dzhg.dev.git
git add .
git commit
git push -u origin master

render did other parts.

Let’s hope everything would get better soon.

(My writtings will also get better, hopefully)