Those of you “in the know” may notice that this website is build using the static site generator Hugo.
This blog is a documented account of my experience building the site.
Humble Beginnings
To give some context to this journey, I will outline my current expertise in building websites:
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have built several Flask web apps, hand-writing HTML, typically making use of Bootstrap for styling, and even built a HTML rendering library in Python (Pythoml).
So actually, I have some experience in HTML, very little in the way of CSS - but none in the way of site generators, typical “page”/“post”/“blog”/“layout”… stuff.
I started off following the Hugo Getting Started -> Quick Start tutorial. A quick check fo what it looked like with hugo serve and bam, I had a terrible flashbang of a website filled with royal blue, underscored links. Retro 😎
My first stop was to have a quick read of the Themes documentation, which led me almost straight into a theme library.
After looking through several of the theme’s, it became clear that the theme drove what kind of content was published. By that I mean, some themes are geared towards blog sites, some for “feed” like sites, etc. So, I had to decide on what content I wanted to include on the website.
I had some idea of what I wanted, but hadn’t really settled on a solid plan. I maybe should have done this from the offset, but it was interesting to see that different theme’s were flexible enough to specify content types (in a loose, and not so loose way).
After a little deliberation, I decided I want to have:
- Posts
These would serve as medium-to-small walls of text that embody “update” type material. For example, “We have updated Xin.XYZ library to version… blah”
- Blogs
I wanted to include blogs so I could have a space to put longer content / ramblings about stuff that I find interesting.
- Documentation
I also wanted a section to house the documentation for our various libraries. How the HTML is rendered for these is still up for debate, but at least having the capability to house them here would be nice.