Hello! I welcome you to this first entry on my very own site!
Before you go, I can maybe make the time you spent to navigate here worth while and explain a little about this site, about me and you might take some new insight with you dear stranger.
So then, let me tell you something about this magical website and how it came to be.
“It’s just Hugo!”
That’s right! It is just Hugo as you might have seen it at the very bottom of the page and you might think “well this isn’t a very magical website at all” and you may be right BUT it does something which is almost as good as magic.
As of writing this post I’m hosting the site on Codeberg via Codeberg Pages which - like Github Pages - only allow for static content to be deployed. And here is where the problem lies.
If you want a website that can serve posts using only static sites they have to be in HTML right? But unless you can speak fluent HTML5 you probably don’t want to hack at raw Hypertext all day. So you have to come up with a solution that can:
- serve different posts using only static sites
- don’t require large amounts of new learning
- change the content without much trouble
- keep the original content in a portable format (like Markdown <3)
- generate a small website that doesn’t take forever to load simple hypertext
You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that a SSG does all that since I’m using one and tell you about it.
“But what about the magic?”
The magic I am talking about is that this website is fulfilling it’s purpose perfectly.
What’s the big deal?
In the past I tried many different ways to create a website that does it all. I did self-hosting on a virtual server, building the site with a frontend-framework called Vue, without a framework but using different styles going from using shadow DOM to HTMX all the way to backend Web-development using Actix Web and trying my luck in making a custom SSG using Rust, Diesel and a markdown converter. These tries also included an unhealthy amount of combinations between all of them which was tedious to say the least.
I made some progress, learned many things along the way but ended up with unsatisfying results. The best concept for me personally was the custom SSG which ended up being quite similar to Hugo. I learned a lot in the process but still I started to grow a little frustrated after reviewing the time I spent building proof of concepts and trying out every possible way to make a website.
So what was the problem?
I suppose the problem was not having a clear picture of the problem or the goal.
All these technologies i mentioned are surely useful when used for the right problem. Heck, some attempts even made valid websites that I still ended up scrapping. What i want to point out is the following:
Before using any tool, technology or framework, make sure that it makes sense for the problem and figure out your actual problem first. (This also applies for concepts in programming!)
My little history here is probably best used as a warning for those who just want to “go at it”. Take your time. Think it over and analyze the problem. Find out what problems you are facing. Writing them down in a list like I did above can save A LOT of time and enables you to get a more precise picture of the problem.
Now this can at times be easier said than done but taking hours analysing a problem is still better than wasting days coding something that doesn’t solve it.
What’s to come?
Since this website is just a place for me to throw out random thoughts I have or explanations which have no other place to exist, expect me to create, modify, update and delete posts at random without notice. That’s the neat part of having your own website ;)
If you have any suggestions or thoughts that you want to share with me about my work or my posts, try and find an E-Mail at any public profile that I own like my Codeberg or my Github.
Also expect spelling mistakes.
Links
(In order of appearance)
https://codeberg.org
https://vuejs.org/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_components/Using_shadow_DOM
https://htmx.org/
https://actix.rs/
https://diesel.rs/
https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark
https://codeberg.org/Sebito
https://github.com/Sebbito