New Site Update!
I talk about the new site overhaul into HTML using Hugo!
Exciting news I have a new site (this one haha)!
Why leave Wix? (on my Lapras)
Over the summer I contemplated moving away from Wix for a variety of reasons:
- the subscription costs keep rising to maintain the good looking cheapest premium plan
- the storage is very limited for the price being paid, I only had like 1gb which I paid over £100 each year for (awful)
- it was getting very slow to use including actually viewing it which put me off of using it
- poor themes for displaying code and presenting tech art work, the images failed to load properly half the time
- the mobile view was horrendous and hard to work with
My biggest problem about switching off of a visual website maker like WIX was to consider how I would actually maintain it and use it. I’m quite busy either at work or with my personal life so adding a super complex system that would require a lot of coding in languages I’m not familiar with such as HTML and CSS would actively put me off of wanting to do stuff on my site. I’ve always wanted a personalised slice of the internet so earlier this week I decided to jump into the deep end of building a static HTML site using Hugo to see how far I could get.
What is Hugo?
Hugo is a very easy to spin up free static site maker that uses your terminal to spin up a development server allowing you to view your content as you edit your live files in Visual Code. I was suprised how fun it is to see your changes pop through in real time. It also has a great bundle of themes from its fantastic community and uses the Markdown language mainly for your content like posts which is super easy to get used to. My biggest fear was having to wait to fully learn HTML and CSS to get anything done on a new site, especially one that would be hosting my portfolio.
Luckily thats not the case with Hugo, its very forgiving and the structure of storing files, editing HTML and adjusting CSS values is very intuitive. That being said it has not been fully smooth transition, I’ve broken the site quite a bit before deploying in the effort to get used to the strange synatxes and rules of the web. I spent over a hour trying to figure out why my thumbnails were gone and sub pages werent working turns out I was missing a single “_” which broke the folder. However its been super fun and I’m learning a lot along the way!
Some cool stuff my site has:
- custom cursor (cowboy hats yeehaw!)
- view counter at the bottom
- cool breakdowns that load and link to my Github!
- pokemon gifs galore!
Learning how these sites actually go online
Growing up on the web, I always used to wonder how the online world was put together. I’ve been avidly learning about various parts of this process by using Docker containers for my own home lab filled with my favorite media and music however putting a website on there has been a great mystery. Fortunately there is a lot of great documentation for Hugo and Github pages so all I have to do is push a new build to my repo and everything is auto deployed onto the web. I did however have a lot of issues with my custom.css not going through, turns out I had a problem with a page integrity which made the theme fail to pull my custom.css file. I remove that bit and everything works well!
I really like Hugo and I’m pretty happy with how the site is coming along, that being said I have stuff to pop back to so stay tuned whilst I roll some dice.
Credits
- Static site built by Hugo - https://gohugo.io/
- Site Theme from https://github.com/mrmierzejewski/hugo-theme-console/
- Hitcounter by https://hitscounter.dev/
- Cursor from https://www.cursors-4u.com/cursor/oth172
This site is powered with Hugo using the Console Theme.