Putting writing on a website in 2021 is surprisingly pleasant, despite a few glitches.
I wanted to have a plain old static site. I can write raw HTML well
enough, and I knew about Bootstrap,
but that still seemed like too much work. Instead, I looked at a
couple
overviews of static site generators, and
I ended up picking Hugo as the one most fitting
my sensibilities. You write pages and posts in Markdown, run Hugo, and
get static HTML/CSS/JS out. It has a built-in web server with hot
reloading so that you can run hugo server, edit your site, and see
it in your browser right away. The builds are really fast; I am using
a potato cheap Chromebook from
2018
and the site still builds in less than 100 ms.
Now, let’s talk about hosting. At first, I thought that I was going to
host the site out of an Amazon S3 bucket or GitHub
Pages, but then I read some
recommendations for Netlify, and I’m glad
I went with them instead. Setup was straightforward (though they want
an ALIAS or ANAME DNS record, which is some kind of Amazon Route
53
thing
that Google Domains doesn’t support, so I had to fiddle with Google
Domains' control panel to set a plain A record), and included
automatic SSL certificate provisioning with Let’s
Encrypt. Writing a netlify.toml is a bit
fiddly, but there is a nice tutorial from the Hugo
folks. Now,
every time I push the site source code to a private GitHub repository,
Netlify automatically builds and pushes to production.