While the rest of the world is worrying about the COVID-19 global pandemic, I decided to do a third redesign of my personal website.
Migration to Google Cloud Storage
I decided a few years ago I wanted to stop paying hosting fees. Several places had emerged where I could host for free or almost free. I played around with AWS and GCP. Each had free tiers where I could learn. I ended up moving my hosting to Google Cloud Storage since there is a permanent free tier and it tied in with my overall Google account.
While I was researching cloud hosts, I realized my current site was embarrassing. I hadn’t updated the thing in 8 years. It was looking pretty shabby.
Static Site Generation with Hugo
I’ve been interested in static site generators since before I did my last redesign. It always felt like having a full database (such as Wordpress) for my dinky blog was overkill. When I did my last redesign (in 2012 or so), I ended up going with a Perl-based system called Blosxom. I think Blosxom was one of the first, if not THE first, static site generators.
Since then, the number of static site generators has blown up. Now they have a cool new name (JAMstack). When I was looking to get off my hosting provider, I looked at several static site generators and landed on Hugo for the following reasons:
- Extensive library of decent looking templates
- Distributed as a single executable (Jekyll, for instance, requires a Ruby environment to be set up)
- Written in Go, which I don’t know but I’m interested in. I only know Python, and the only static site generator that I found using Python is Pelican, but their templates are not great.
So now I have a site up, generated with Hugo, hosted on the Google Cloud for free. Woot.