I decided to create this site as a central hub for all my contact and professional/academic information, mostly for professional reasons. Keeping the site static was also a requirement, since maintaining a server is not very fun. So I picked Hugo, a static site generator, because my first 15 minutes of experience with Jekyll were not very satisfactory, and I also loved the idea of using a Golang project. While building the site I learned many new things, and here are some notes on this process:
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I picked GoDaddy to be my domain registrar in order to avoid giving more power to one of the tech giants that already provide me with some other service (Google, Amazon). However, this was a regrettable decision: their site’s the UI is flaky and their customer support line is highly backed up. I will probably transfer my domain soon.
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Initially this site was going to be hosted through GitHub Pages, however it seemed like a bad idea to host my post content next to open-source code (this site is available in a GitHub repository) due to possible licensing issues: I do not want my content to be open-source, only my code. I still wrote a short license stating explicitly that only the code is under the GPLv3 and that all rights are reserved for the content, but this seems like an inelegant solution. After all, content has no place in a code repository. This presented the opportunity to learn about Amazon’s web services, which were very easy to use (thumbs up for providing a command-line tool to update the content of my S3 buckets).
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Making a static website was a less pleasant experience than expected. Already being highly familiar with web development there was still a lot of overhead in learning how to use Hugo. This would have probably been much easier if the site used a Hugo theme, but I did not want to bring in code that could one day be deprecated. I also like owning all the code used in the site (except for Hugo, that is).
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The minimalist, somewhat dated look of the site is intentional. I sought a style that looked like a CS professor site (that is, like shit), as I enjoy the irony of the situation. But I also did not want to give the impression of only knowing the very basics of web development. The result was this hodgepodge. Moreover, avoiding the massive amount of abstraction layers that is now commonplace in web development was a desirable feature. I prefer that my own personal hells have less layers than Dante’s. Due to this, there is barely any JavaScript in the site, and there are no dependencies other than Hugo.
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Writing this first post was extremely easy (markdown is nice), so I guess all the overhead was well worth it.