Building a custom static website

Tue, Apr 16, 2019

I’ve been thinking of setting up a technical blog for quite some time now and I understand there are many options available online. None of them clicked for me however for various reasons:

1. The design needs to be simple (think Donald Knuth’s personal website). The extreme version of this kind of design is known as Prof. Dr. Style, as they were commonly seen on University stuff profile pages. They are the fine relics of “pre-historical” internet without CSS or JS.
2. The site should also be static. A live server poses too many unnecessary attack surfaces, and maintaining posts in a database is another time sink with jobs such as migrations and backup.

I chose Hugo as I knew it quite well from previous projects, and I was thrilled to know that nowadays Hugo allows you to use SCSS without a JS taskrunner.

Now the site is versioned on GitLab and hosted on Netlify.

I’m pretty happy about it.