This is the 42nd version of my personal website and weblog, once again self-hosted at Dreamhost. I use the site as a forcing function; a way to learn various languages and tools, and a kick to get back into the habit of writing and publishing.
This year I ported the content from Write.as to a self-hosted Hugo setup, which took about a day. Everything about Hugo has been better than expected, and the only hiccup was on the hosting side (SSL setup was broken for a few hours).
Hugo is a featureful static site generator written in Go. It’s fast, it’s tidy, it’s modern, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo has a simple pipeline for content that sits on Markdown and TOML (or Yaml/JSON), and uses a simple folder structure that maps clearly to the components of a website. The command line tools have the feel of Brew or Rails, so it’s easy to get productive quickly. And deployment with Hugo, similar to other static site generators, is as easy as copying files to your CDN or webserver.
I should write more
While I’ve always hoped to have more time to write, I think I can instead look at my desire to write as a metric for how healthy my perspective is, and strive to balance life and work stresses better. Sometimes changing tooling helps get me back in the groove of organizing my thoughts into tokens and essays.
I have added a few new categories to the latest version of the site, to track my obsession with food, and my love of makery. At some point I want to take my personal cookbook and publish it using Hugo, and I have a project started to built out some custom tools for Hugo and Google Docs to get the content into a nicer shape.