Notes

Short history, journey and choices along the way to making this site.

Why a static site ?

A long time ago in the days of web1.0 I learnt enough basic HTML to create webpages and write up some stuff which was then hosted for free by the various ISPs I was using at the time.

The web evolved and I went off and did other stuff so never got around to learning CSS, document models or web2.0 concepts. When I decided to start putting things on the web again various services and frameworks (blogger, Wordpress etc) existed along with social media (Facebook etc). Definitely quite a different world from web1.0

So I started using a free blog hosting service with the DNS provider I was using at the time (GANDI.NET before they were purchased by venture capital). When that service was closed I moved to a self-hosted version of WordPress and then moved again to a self-hosted version of Ghost.

I discovered with WordPress that my content was in a CMS database and extracting/transferring this was a little hit and miss. I also became more concerned over the attack-surface that a more complex system (such as WordPress and Ghost) presented.

Given that;

1. I don’t need comments or monitization,
2. I don’t need to update “on the fly”,
3. Want to have my content in a simpler text based format. it seemed that a web1.0 type static website approach was probably a better fit for an old tech-head like me.

Why HUGO ?

There are a number of static website generators but hugo seemed to be the simplest to install on my macbook with brew (a comand line package manager) and didn’t seem to need any extra toolchains or other installs.

Most of the static website generators support a version of markdown which also provides a really simple way of keeping all the content in structured text files. By doing this the “theme” can be easily changed without needing much work to update the content (which is definitely a step up from the hand-coded html files of web1.0).

Why lightbi

This theme has most of the features (search, a nice photo gallery, works on both computer and mobile) I wanted out of the box without additional configurations. Its not perfect and did require some additional tweaks and configuration changes but, on the whole, it works.

So there you have it. This is a static website generated by HUGO from markdown content files. Additional pages or notes can quickly be added using HUGO cli commands. Other content (images and videos) can also easily be integrated into the website (although just not real-time - guess we’ll have to keep using social media for our instant gratification - or just slow down and live life a little).

This is an important note. I think.

Well, actually it isn’t all that important. But I needed another note to check things were working properly.