At first I considered making a site from the ground up with all the bells and whistles with a server-side language but I found myself looking back again and again towards static site generators. For those that are not aware, these are basically software packages you install on your computer. You feed them your content data, typically in the form of a Markdown file, and they spew out the generated HTML site using a template you chose or designed. This can then be uploaded to your web host using any method such as FTP.
The two that got my attention the most are Jekyll and Hugo. Jekyll is the one promoted by GitHub for their Pages service but I found that it tended to be a bit on the heavier side with quite a lot of dependencies. Hugo on the other hand is very simple and light weight. The whole package was only roughly under 8mb in size.
I have to investigate a few more aspects to it as I'm totally unfamiliar with working with these. That includes but are not limited to:
- how flexible is the theming system
- how easy is it to synchronize with the webhost
- how possible is it to move my old posts over to the new system
- how much can I customize its behavior before having to dig into the source code to add features I want
- how feasible is it to make redirects to "legacy pages"
- and so on and so forth
For the second issue, I already have a sort-of solution for it in the form of rclone. I can just setup a new remote for my site and just push the updates with rclone's sync feature.
So that about wraps up this blog post for now. I'll probably make a post again if I've made progress on this end. Sure I won't have all the nice stuff that comes with Google's Blogger such as page view counts, and unlimited image/video hosting, but I'll figure something out to work around that.
