It’s been over 20 years since I’ve had a personal website, so when I decided to set one up recently, I discovered it was both easier and harder than it was several decades earlier. I remember writing HTML in Notepad for my first website, Nove Miglia, back in the 90s. I don’t think it had more than a couple of pages, and none of them had anything consequential on them. I can’t remember where I hosted it but it was one of those sites where you copied your files via FTP, and they showed up under a home directory, i.e. somesite.com/~novemiglia.

Fast forward to today. I’d previously used Medium to post the occasional article, but I wanted more control over the organization of content. And I wanted to plant my stake in the ground of the internet and say, this is mine. I made it. Given how long it’s been since I last created a static site, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. A friend recommended SquareSpace to me, but their cheapest plan is $16 a month. I knew from previous experience that I could host static content in an S3 bucket in AWS for pennies a month, so $16 seemed a bit steep. I understood the tradeoff would be more upfront effort, but I’m an engineer. How hard could it be? And once that initial effort was completed, maintenance should be trivial. So, now that I knew I wanted to host it in S3, the next step was to figure out how to create a site. The hardest way would be to code the entire thing from scratch. I ruled that out pretty quickly because every post would entail a lot of copy/paste boilerplate code. I knew there had to be a better way, and I stumbled across that way while reading a post from Will Larson, that mentioned Hugo, a static site generator.

Bingo. It was an open-source app that took care of all the logistics and let you focus on content. I’d never heard of a static site generator (SSG), but after some basic research, I knew it was exactly what I was looking for. No backend to worry about, pick a template, and then focus on the content. I did some light research on the other big names in the SSG area, such as Jekyll and Gatsby. Hugo seemed to have a steeper learning curve than others, but it was fast, minimal, and actively maintained. I found this great breakdown of the SSGs out there from several years ago. Hugo has a good selection of user-made themes, all free to use. That was a big selling point for me. I wanted my site to look good, but I didn’t want to spend weeks designing it. And the themes can be tweaked once you start to understand how things work with Hugo.

As advertised, Hugo’s learning curve was steep. The quick start tutorial was easy enough, but once you move beyond that, things get a bit trickier. Leaf bundles, branch bundles, front matter, shortcode, it’s easy to quickly get overwhelmed. I focused on figuring out how to change small things, leaning heavily on Googling for answers until I got a feel for how things worked. I’m far from an expert, but I can usually figure out how to do something much more quickly now. For instance, I wanted to add images with captions to my articles. There’s markdown for that, but it left aligns the article and there’s no caption option. After Googling around, and detouring down some side roads, I discovered a built-in solution using shortcodes. And when the styling wasn’t quite right, I learned where the styles were stored and how to update them. Once the site was created and the posts looked like I wanted them, it was time to actually publish it. AWS makes this pretty straightforward. Their documentation isn’t always the best, but they have reasonably straightforward instructions for statically hosting content in S3. Once the S3 buckets were set up and linked to the domain name I purchased, it was just a matter of copying the generated site over. After a short wait, it was live. After almost a three-decade absence, I’d set up a site again.

Surprisingly, one of the hardest parts of this process, and the thing that nearly derailed the entire effort, was choosing a domain name. I wanted something pithy, something memorable. But I’m an engineer, not a marketer. So, I eventually settled on a form of my name that was still available for less than $20.

For me, this is MVP. I can easily create new content and publish it with minimal effort. I can now move on to actually writing. However, if I have time in the future, three potential improvements would be:

• Storing the relevant content in Git
• Deploying the site with a single command vs logging into AWS and manually copying files into S3 bucket
• Enabling https