Site Technologies

3 minute read

As the new site has been put together on new platforms I had never used before, I thought a post about this may inspire others to give them a go also.

Hugo

The website itself has been developed with the HUGO framework. ‘Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators. With its amazing speed and flexibility, Hugo makes building websites fun again.’ To be honest until last week I had not even heard of HUGO. I came across it reading an article about how Smashing Magazine will be using HUGO for their new website

The article had me intrigued as the idea of re-building my website had been in the back of my mind for a while. I followed the really simple quick start guide and realised how quickly I could potentially get something up and running.

Steps

It really was a simple as:

  • Install via Chocolately (package manager)
  • Create a new site via the cmd line
  • Select and download theme from the gallery
  • Configure site settings

That’s it, you then have a simple templated site you can run up locally and start thinking about content.

Hosting

As HUGO is a static site builder you can host your static content on pretty much any service. They also provide guides on some of the more popular platforms like; GitHub, Firebase, BitBucket and others.

As I already use a lot of services from Google and had no experience of Firebase, I looked into that as a potential option first. On review of their pricing I saw that I could host for free, with my custom domain and even a SSL cert on the Spark plan.

In order to deploy my new HUGO site to Firebase the steps were:

  • Login to Firebase with my Google account and setup a new project
  • Install the Firebase tools
  • Login and initialise my project via the command line
  • Deploy with a single command

Now every time I write a new post and want to push it live I just need to run a single command.

Early impressions

I was certainly impressed with the speed in which I managed to go from no website to a new themed blog all deployed in just over an hour. For anyone like me who is looking to put a basic blog together, which they want to write content in Markdown, I don’t think you can really go wrong with HUGO.