Relaunch
"Now powered by Hugo. Also actually self-hosted."
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The site has now been rebuilt from the ground up.
After originally setting out to create a personal website fully from scratch, in manually written HTML, I quickly realised why noone does this.
It may have been an interesting experiment at first, as well as being a good way to relearn HTML after last dealing with it years ago at university but as the website grew, adding or updating any content became really cumbersome and writing new blog posts became a chore.
I tried to simplify things by introducing JavaScript to automatically list blog posts and site news, but this still required a lot of manual setup for each new post being written. If I wanted to be in any way consistent with the site, some sort of framework was required.
I have experience with WordPress - It completely put me off using website builders, frameworks etc. Trying to self-host it is a frustrating experience of fighting PHP and attempting to build a truly custom site from scratch is downright headache-inducing.
All this considered, Hugo always stood out to me as the simplest, most minimal ways of generating static sites such as this one. I’ve initially started reading some of the documentation months ago but put off committing to it until just now, as it seemed like a completely new paradigm of web development.
I finally commited to rebuilding my website in it exactly a week ago and what you see as of this blog post is where I got to with 0 prior experience.
Learning it, creating templates and quickly writing new pages in simple markdown (which I’m already familiar with thanks to Obisian) has been the most fun I’ve had with this project so far.
I’m now all in on Hugo, can’t see myself going back, and am more motivated than ever to actually keep this website active.
In other news, I’m now self-hosting this website from home - I have a Proxmox hypervisor running on a Dell OptiPlex 7050 small form factor PC and this website is running on one of a few web server VMs.