This post is part one in a two-part series on switching my website to Hugo. It covers my reasoning behind making the switch. For the technical details on hosting my website, read part two.

A Re-Introduction

Hello friends, and welcome [back] to my blog! It has been quite some time since my last post, and I thought I’d take a moment to catch everyone up to speed on the changes I’ve made since then.

A “new” website.

For those reading via RSS, you will notice little to no change. However, if you point your browser to https://tdback.net, things will look noticeably different.

Some may recall that my old website employed the use of the TiddlyWiki, a wonderful piece of software that allows you to create a non-linear notebook for organizing and sharing complex information. The downside to using a TiddlyWiki as my primary blogging platform was the need to do almost everything in the browser. As someone who spends a majority of their time editing text inside neovim, I found myself sorely missing my beloved vim motions and the ability to quickly move around my system using tools such as tmux or fzf. In short: I missed my terminal.

When researching static site generators, I stumbled across the ever so popular Hugo. I immediately found it quite compelling: writing an entry to my blog would be nothing more than editing a markdown file, and I could write scripts to easily generate and deploy my site to a web server. Hugo also comes with a built-in RSS feed generator, meaning that I didn’t have to write one myself (although I quite enjoyed doing so).

While I’ve traditionally thrown my site’s index.html file onto GitHub Pages and/or Codeberg Pages, as a hobbyist self-hoster I’d be doing an injustice by not hosting the server on my own hardware. While I would encourage others to take advantage of free static site hosting services such as GitHub Pages, I’ve found that I quite enjoy the responsibilities, challenges, and learning opportunities associated with self-hosting.

Closing Thoughts

So far my experience with Hugo has been great! After just a few hours I had a working site, RSS feed, and an established workflow for writing. If you’re interested in the technical details of how I host my website, read onwards to part two.

Happy hacking!