Art by Fellfallow.
First and foremost I realized I am out of my depth when it comes to web design! I’m using Hugo and a pre-made theme to generate this static site. (Credits in the footer.) Without it, this basic-looking website would be even more basic. (Trust me, my college-era website was a real treat. At least it would load well on dial-up?)
Hugo is a lovely little tool that essentially takes markdown files and HTML/CSS/Javascript templates and smushes them together to make a website. Because I’m using a pre-made theme, all the actual web components are bundled together for me, making the markdown files the real focus… if the theme is perfect. I tried one theme that was simply broken, and then I landed on the current one (Beautiful Hugo) for its relative simplicity while maintaining the functionality I required. Then I took out the CSS scalpel and began hacking away, specifically at the colors. They were fine, but I wanted my sona colors, dangit!
With a (mostly) working theme, now I can move on to creating content for the website, like this page!
Next, what is a website without a host? For that, I spun up SWAG on a server inside a Docker container. SWAG, or Secure Web Application Gateway, is perhaps a little overkill for serving a static website. However, I wanted something that would give me more exposure with Docker and nginx. While setting up nginx from scratch would be a good learning experience, I’m unlikely to find myself using that knowledge much in the future. Docker, however, is consistently present in my life, so the more comfortable I get with it, the better. Also baked in Let’s Encrypt and fail2ban are v. convenient!
Finally, I’m working with real markdown! None of this proprietary almost-markdown stuff. That’s great, but uh, if markdown doesn’t support it, then it isn’t going in to your pages without massive headaches. For example: super/subscript! Would love to alter the size of the font on the fly even just a bit, but that’s not happening. Want an inline image? Think again, images are special and want their own lines! It’s these little things that make want to reevaluate usage of this particular site generation solution. Realistically, though, keeping this website simple will keep the friction of updating it low.
But what would I do differently? Well, I’d not bash my head against a broken theme for three hours! Next, I would likely come up with a more sophisticated scheme for versioning and deployment. As it stands, I have no version control on the files (I know that will upset some people), and to deploy I copy/paste the files from my desktop to a directory on the server for, well, serving. Nothing here is elegant, but neither am I, so!
If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, thanks! I appreciate you for letting me ramble about my experiences. Have a great day! ✨