Making of the site

I had a resume site with the content of the resume page. I built a simple HTML site with the help of materializecss and hosted it on Heroku.

I was happy with it, but it soon became a pain to edit. So when Heroku stopped hosting my site for free, I decided to make a new one. I wanted to make one that is easier to edit and maintain. I also wanted to learn a bit about Hugo , so I decided to make this site with it.

The ability to edit the content in markdown was really important for me, but it’s a topic for another day.

So what did I do?

Well, I tried to port my whole static site to Hugo, which almost came to fruition, and I learned a lot about the structure of a Hugo project. But since I used a CSS library, I would have to add some custom CSS to make it look as it did before.

The problem I faced was that I was unable to add every class for the markup elements that I needed. There could be a solution that I didn’t know about, but I didn’t want to spend more time on it. So I decided to choose a Hugo theme that would render the contents of the content/_index.md and call it a day. I found a theme that I liked, you can check it in the footer :). After trying to set up my own layout, using a theme was a breeze.

I started to think about where and how I could host my site. I knew about Netlify but had never used it, so I decided to give it a try. It was a very good call because the whole operation of setting up a GitHub repo and deploying it with Netlify did not take even five minutes. I was really happy with the result, and the build integration is great. I can check the preview from a pull request, and merging the PR will automatically deploy the site.

That is super neat!

Some extra work!

I did overwrite some layouts, the most baffling one was the render-link.html markup element. The link target was not _blank by default, and I’m deeply offended by that.

version: '3'

services:
  hugo:
    image: jakejarvis/hugo-extended:0.101.0
    ports:
      - 1313:1313
    volumes:
      - ./:/src
    command: server --buildDrafts --buildFuture --bind 0.0.0.0

It starts the hugo server on port 1313, and it also builds drafts and future posts.

Monitoring

I wanted to try UptimeRobot which has a free tier with 5-minute checks for 50 monitors, which is very generous. I’m happy to report that Netlify is quite stable and I did not have any downtime in the last 60 days. Not too surprising, but still nice to know.

Conclusion

I’m really satisfied with the result, it’s easy to change, and I’m happy that I learned a bit of hugo.