I’ve wanted to make content on the internet for a while, and this is my first attempt to do so. I got some motivation while reading a bunch of Fan Pu’s Blog, a graduated CMU student who is quite a genius.
I decided to use Hugo for my own site since it seemed easy to use, it was popular, and if I ever needed to dig into the weeds, or make a theme, I had the Go knowledge to do it. I used Netlify to host the static site. I found it very easy to push to production, set up a domain name, and implement other details very easy and much better than my experience with Heroku.
I wanted to use a static site rather than simpler alternatives like WordPress. I felt as a CS major, it was my duty to code a little bit on this blogging journey. I can look different from the general competition that has similar WordPress templates. Also, it’s nicer to deal with Hugo Templating rather than HTML files and other WordPress overhead.
I ran into a few problems with my first initial Hugo Blog theme. Installation examples encouraged me to build off of the example site that the theme authors used as a demo. However, since I didn’t know anything about Hugo or how the authors structured their folders, I was lost and I didn’t try to blog for a little bit.
After a week, I gave it another shot and used a mainstream blog theme PaperMod. Papermod had much more features than the first, and better documentation on how to create a blog from scratch. I got a better introduction to Hugo documentation and Hugo Blogging. It was fun learning about how static site generators work and gaining some better insights into making websites.
The theme is very simple, yet still nice to read, and the features are good and nice to haves for the future. I plan to incorporate more features as time goes on or as more people visit the site.
This blog was initially started to post the random theoretical ideas that I come up with, but it’s quite difficult to come up with unique ideas very commonly. I want to hopefully arrive at a niche that I enjoy writing about. Maybe if I’m learning about the topic in-depth, that’ll become the purpose of the blog. Until then I hope to write weekly about an idea that seems interesting to the readers and to me (Maybe make some money too).