Kicking off my new website/blog/portfolio with a throw back to my original website. It was your typical single-page, responsive, bootstrap framework website, having started with a wonderful template found online. It was fun getting up the website and taking some artistic liberties with template. Ultimate I ended up with this:

old website

I was happy with how the website looked but I found that it never took off. I had wanted a space where I could easily share projects but my bootstrap website would need more work to facilitate this. With not particular expertise in web design, I got stuck in a rut and never made things.

I realized that I wanted a more mature pre-existing solution that would removed the burden of quickly submitting content. CMS like WordPress come to mind but what I had loved about my bootstrap website goals was to have a completely serverless experience.

I came across Jekyll which showed promise. I had setup some test websites with Jekyll but never got around to making a serious effort at it.

After a few years have passed, a friend reminded me about my website and grilled me for not updating it. I decided to look into the state of static web builders like Jekyll and see if I could make something happen in a short amount of time.

What I landed on was a simple Hugo built website. Previously I had hosted on GitHub and used their static web content hosting. In looking at Hugo I discovered Netlify which dramatically simplifies the deployment of my static website. It also provides CDN and https quite seamlessly, something that was always a “todo” with my old website.

The setup I landed on (Hugo + Netlify) removes the burden of managing mundane aspects of my website. Now I do not have any excuses for sharing projects, thoughts, and other random gems.