This site and blog now uses Hugo and Github pages.
When I registered my domain khalid.se, I was aiming to even have it as a itty.bitty site and be truly serverless. However, I wanted to take on the challenge to host the whole infrastructure by my self to get a real feeling of the challenges of setting up a server, from the OS to the actual HTML files. And it was an experience that taught me a lot, everything from how to set up a webserver, security configuration, log monitoring (to a certain extent).
I have always been a fan of lowtech magazine and their setup. I drew a lot of inspiration from it, and with their latest switch to hugo - I took the plunge to it too. My reasons to go with hugo are:
- It’s simple to manage content, you only need to edit markdown files.
- It’s fast, and focus is on static sites.
- It’s popular, and thus you can enjoy many tutorials, themes and more.
One can question why I chose Github pages. The answer is: cost-efficiency and simplicity. I get to enjoy a lot of outgoing traffic at no cost, and Github actions have proven to be quite convinient. If Github would change to a service that I cannot get behind - I can always make use of my experience of running my own webserver and move my webpage back there. In the meantime, I don’t need to worry about more that 300 bogus attempts per day to find exploits on my server.
The only thing I’m missing, is a way to auto-publish to a pod on a Gemini pod. But I guess in the meantime, there’s always midnight.pub
If you’re curious about Hugo, check out their excellent quickstart guide here
You can also check out Luke Smith’s excellent youtube video on setting up hugo here