🌮 Techo Tuesday 🌮 Make a free website - Static Site Generators and Hugo

September 10, 2019

3-Minute Read

this post source - in markdown

things turning me on this week
☕enjoy with a hot cupa java/script
I’m now migrating off of WordPress and a paid web hosting plan, to a free* website using Hugo and GitLab. It nicely leverages markdown and makes posting content from an editor a breeze. Your entire website is in a git repository – so you can take your entire website anywhere and have a full copy on your laptop (even with networking off). No database!

For me, suddenly writing felt more like writing again - and I get to have full copies of everything (with any luck, the site should last forever..)

Static Site Generators

Basically, instead of a server-side scripting language-based website (like PHP or python) - these kind of websites have you writing basic HTML. But versions like Jekyll and Hugo, um, go, a step further. They have you write in a much more natural way, using MarkDown.

They get cute by having a ‘production’ step that prepares your site and does some light transforms of your pages into a new /public/ subdir (that your pages serve from), converting markdown to HTML (AKA markup). It sums up your ’tags’ and ‘categories’ and makes static simple pages based on them, eg: /categories/coding/. It uses your “number of posts per page” variable to auto-paginate and make static simple pages like: /page/2/ or /tags/biking/page/2/.

They also can get clever about user comments - allowing Discus or ‘staticman’ as ways to get comments into your site and onto your pages. I chose staticman because my code repository will get the comments (instead of being stored in some external service).

Hugo

huGO
Hugo is a blisteringly fast alternative to Jekyll, based on the superfast (and quite new) Go language (more like C language in terms of speed, statically typed, and compiled). My older brother suggested it after noting his similar blog of 10years+ of entries was taking minutes to build in Jekyll - but seconds with Hugo.

Setup Hugo

You can quickstart very.. quickly! There’s a bunch of themes you can pick from - I chose the one below.

Deploy to the world

You can use GitLab or GitHub - I prefered GitLab because I use its build process at work and it has the quickest/easiest stup. They want your business, and will host it for free. You setup an account, and git push your laptop directory of files to them. Everything re-deploys automatically ever time you git push an update - easy!

(*) You can get your own hostname and point it to your GitLab (or GitHub) site url for a nicer URL, for about $20/year

Tracey Jaquith · PoohBot Pictures