Written by Earick C
on 

Creating this Blog

After spending some time searching the internet for different options to build a blog from scratch, I was eventually sold on the idea of using an SSG paired with a CDN. I’ve decided to use Hugo as the framework for generating my blog site as its main advantages is being very fast and while also having a consistently growing community whom are passionate in building more themes. For the CDN, Netlify seemed the better choice with my Github account comparable to the other options.

Being a millennial with the webdev experience tantamount to a highschooler level hobbyist, it took some time to get reacquainted with current resources and best practices based on my particular needs, and I’m fairly certain I haven’t explored all of my options. Here are the few tools I had to familiarize myself with in order to get this working:

*Note: I’m on a Win10 environment and I’m using VS Code as part of my workflow

Hugo

Hugo is an open-source static site generator written in Go utilizing Markdown as a means to create content. It’s ideal for people who prefer to write in a text editor over a browser, those who want to code their website without worrying about back end set up like databases, and a seemingly ideal solution for setting up a blog with some level of code customization.

Creating the blog with Hugo

I started writing out the process step by step and about the third paragraph in, I realized there isn’t much I can explain that isn’t easily referenced from online resources. I also got really lazy at that point when I thought about how much more I’d have to explain in order to stay consistent :). Thusly, here’s a stripped down version:

Installing Hugo wasn’t difficult. I simply download the files from the Hugo website and updated the path variable to include Hugo.

*Tip: To do this in powershell you would use:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", "C:\TestPath", "User")

Utilizing documentation regarding GIT and Hugo as well as the leser known resources such as “google” and “the internet”, I was able to build create the blog along with the “tale” theme that was ported from Jekyll; I considered using Jekyll as my SSG but decided to go with Hugo in the end.

Basically, I used Hugo to generate the architecture of the website, import a theme from the wide selection available, customized to my personal preference, add content as .md files, spun it and presto (bing bang boom). I got myself a blog soup.

The next order of business and arguably the more annoying aspect of this process is setting up GIT / Github to push the generated website to my repository and finally deploying it with Netlify. (Did you know github renamed the default branch from master to main?!)

My experience

It was really fun and motivating once I had got the ball rolling. I really enjoyed learning all of these new tools and I was very happy to come out of the experience with a finished product that I personally like.