Project Goals

  • Create a website that can be statically generated from markdown files
  • Put all files needed for the static generation in version control
  • Create infrastructure around the generation and deployment of the website
  • Deploy the website to a public cloud

About the Website

This website is generated using Hugo, a static website generator written in Go. The content for this website is written in Markdown files that are then parsed by Hugo and a static website is generated. During generation, a theme is used for generating the HTML pages.

Theme

The theme for this website is Strata from HTML5Up by aj. I have been using them theme for my landing page for the last couple of year. When I made the decision to switch to Hugo, I went looking for this theme and happy that someone had already ported it. Strata was then ported to a Hugo theme by digitalcraftsman, but the theme hadn’t been maintained in a couple year.

I forked the theme and merged in all of the PR’s that had been ignored over the years. I also went through the theme and added some features that I wanted, like the ability to just list a Social Media side and user name in an arbitrary order, and have the links generated in that order. I also updated the Font Awesome font icons to the latest version and I decided to self host them rather than use their CDN.

Sections

The website supports several sections. The only section that is currently being used in the posts section, which contains this blog post. There is also a portfolio section that I will use for hosting static pages of projects that I build.

Generation

The site is generated using: hugo

This builds the website and places it into the public directory. This directory can then be copied directly to a web host.

Version Control

Hugo has several built in features that tie in with git. The page modification date can be inferred using the git history of the file and is set to the .Lastmod value. This allows for less manual, arbitrary data to be updated by Hugo rather than me. The .Date value, or the date that the page was created is not readily exposed using Hugo. This needs to be set in the frontmatter of the post, or it could be programmatically updated using an external script.

Deployment

This website is currently deployed manually using rsync to a free virtual machine in Google Clouds’s Compute Engine. The virtual machine is running Debian 10, with nginx acting as the web server. The website is secured using an SSL certificate provided by Let’s Encrypt.