Purpose

There are many reasons for why one would want a website for personal use. In my case I needed a website that would fulfil the following criteria:

  • Website hosting must be free (because I’m poor)
  • Clean-looking
  • Add content with ease
  • Easy to set up

The main purpose of this website is to share content and my toughts on various topics for me and my friends. Besides, I haven’t done anything like this before. So naturally I went out and asked google for advice on what technology to use for building a website. I was instantly overwhelmed with the number of options available.

Options

After a bit of searching I’ve stumbled upon this article by Konstantin Tretyakov which answered all of my questions in a very structured and concise way. If you ever need help deciding what options are the most suitable for building your own future website I highly recommend the aforementioned article.

End result

I’ve decided to go with the static site generators as they are the most suitable option for my needs. Now there are a few to choose from, the most popular ones being jekyll and hugo. The first one has been around for a while now, since 2008 and hugo is a bit more fresh, being released in 2013. Now I understood that hugo is more lightweight compared to jekyll but overall they both would work equally well for my website. So hugo it is.

Now comes the question, where do I host? Turns out that github provides free hosting for one website per user. There we go, all the building blocks are in place. Last thing to do was to make an actual website and hook it up to github pages. I ended up making two repos in github, one for source code and the other one for static files the source repo generates. Then link them together using github sumbodules and bada bing, bada boom - you’re done!

If you’re interested in how that looks in detail, check out this video.