For a long time, I was running a webserver that served up a few handwritten HTML pages. I’d used the Bootstrap to try and make the content a bit prettier, but it was never that great. In addition I was rarely able to add content, since writing HTML is a relatively slow and boring process.
My friend Harry Beadle showed me how he’d started writing his website in markdown, using Jekyll to convert the files into a complete website.
While this solution looked quite exciting, but I was reluctant to set up Ruby. Ruby didn’t seem terribly lightweight - and being a student I don’t have a huge chunk of money to pour into server solutions! StaticGen links to a plethora of static site generators. I settled on Hugo, which promises to be fast and light, and works in Go’s comparatively simple ecosystem.
With the executable on my machine, I had a pretty website up and running in 5 minutes, using the Blackburn theme.
From there it was a simple case of writing documents in markdown, a process which I was more than familiar with! So far it’s looking very promising!