Technology

How I set up this website

A few notes on the technology behind this website:

It uses a static site generator called Hugo. Writing content offline and then generating a static site works very well for hand-written, non-dynamic content. It also means the generated website is very, very fast and eliminates many security issues. This simplicity makes it far easier to maintain over the long term.

As the content is just a collection of Markdown files that are generated into HTML and then uploaded to GitHub Pages, I’ll never lose my website, as it’s not owned by any third party. The Hugo code is open source, so I can use and modify it even if the maintainers abandon the project.

Why to choose Ghost for your blog

2021 update: I no longer use Ghost to power this blog! But I still think it’s an outstanding project and that the company are pioneering many practices that should be more widespread. I still frequently recommend it to others. Alas, the nerd in me got hooked on blogging via writing offline and committing changes through git. This blog is now powered by Hugo.

Up until now, every time I wanted to start writing I’d expend 97% of my energy thinking about how I could build a blog, which features I want, testing fonts, browsing themes and saving colour schemes. The remaining 3% went towards some writing. It’s the curse of being a developer.