Migrating to a static site with Hugo and Cloudflare
My old site
My old site consisted of two parts - a Vue frontend, and a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. There was no rhyme or reason to this. I just wanted to learn some basics about Vue and deploying an app. But the time has come to scrap that (even though I really like how I made the homepage look).
Honestly I like the new one better anyways
Since JS and its innumerable frameworks aren’t something I really touch often, it was just a pain in the ass to ever try to update my website. Also, the blog portion was hosted on Wordpress, which apparently I chose to pay for at some point and I don’t want to anymore.
The new site
So now I’m using a static site generated by Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I chose Hugo because it’s configurable enough that I’m 90% sure I’ll be happy with it long-term, and Cloudflare because the free tier is generous and very fast. My old website on GCP’s AppEngine was pretty slow and cost me (a small amount of) money.
The template I’m currently using, LoveIt, looks great and is easy to customize and configure.
Comments
One of my favorite new features that pretty much comes out of the box with this new setup is the ability to have comments. Wordpress had their own comment system, and it was one of the reasons I went with them in the first place, but I like Disqus much better.
Logo
I felt like I needed a logo. I’ve never really used a logo but I thought it would be cool to make something out of the letters V and M. After playing with it for a little while, I found I can make two Vs and two Ms look like a spider, which is funny (to me) because I’m terrified of spiders.
Do you see a spider?
Future
I was pretty inactive on my website for a long time. That was partially due to being lazy, but mostly due to the fact that, as mentioned above, I just didn’t like the way I had to update it. Now, I simply add some markdown to my git repo, push it, and Cloudflare handles the rest. Extremely convenient! So anyways, I intend to post more random stuff, what I’m working on, random thoughts, whatever.
Enjoy the new site!
Edits
2021-04-29
Well that didn’t last long LOL. I found out LoveIt is unmaintained, so I tried the two still-maintained forks, DoIt and FeelIt. I ended up going with FeelIt mainly because the Disqus colors were horribly broken on DoIt.