Towards the beginning of 2017, I started a blog using Jekyll on Github Pages to talk about my interviewing processes and the things I was learning. Though that was the original intention, there were always a few things that irked me a little:
- My blog content always skewed a little too personal, in my opinion. Aptly named as “life.log”, I talked about everything from my extracurriculars to my personal life to my actual interviews and how I felt about all of it, but not really what I learned, at all.
- The fact that my “username” website from Github Pages and my blog were technically two different repos - something I didn’t really know how to reconcile.
- My “username” website was always rooted in the idea that it should be a simple one-pager. I’m not a complicated person. So I just wrote it in HTML and CSS. However, as I’ve started to seek a way to showcase my literary works as well (something quite repetitive in form), I wanted something more flexible and sustainable.
Today I’m moving to Hugo. Some reasons that helped motivate me:
- I wanted to do a write-up for a CTF I recently did, but I had no idea where I wanted to host it. Shockingly, the place I called my blog - I really did not want anyone to actually see it for technical content (see: “too personal” above).
- I found themes (quite easily, actually) to help me remedy the whole “two repo” situation. I’m sure Jekyll could’ve done it for me too, but too late, we’re here now.
- Hugo is fast, and built on Go (which I’m learning on Exercism right now). Jekyll is a little slower, and built on Ruby. With my Jekyll blog, the list of Ruby dependencies I needed was staggering (most likely due to my theme choice - added before Github offered the theming option). I didn’t even understand half of what they were - I just updated them whenever dependabot came along. That kind of lack of understanding something I, myself, maintained made me feel pretty insecure and uncomfortable. With Hugo, I like the enthusiastic community and I’m excited to dig into (and maybe even contribute to!) their source code.
Edit: Hugo itself has its own problem where the source and public folders are designed to be in separate areas (for a monorepo setup), but for now this will do just fine (just shows how I did not thoroughly do my research).
Other methods I considered were Medium (a site that hosted some of my more literary content for a while), Ghost, and just using a Notion page.
- While Medium is certainly an easy option to use, I’m much less comfortable hosting all of my content on it now than 5 years ago. I’ve changed a lot and so has the Medium revenue model.
- Ghost is still an alluring option, somewhat, but I enjoy how Hugo can integrate with Github Pages easily and I don’t have to finagle what’s hosting this.
- Finally, Notion pages are so, so, incredibly convenient given that I just use Notion for almost all of my notes ever (since around 2018) but I wanted a bit more flexibility still, and using my notebook as a publishing space veers into the “personal” space once more. Also, configuring domain names and such seems like it would be a pain (I don’t even have a custom domain for this page yet).
Some inspirations for choosing the Cactus theme: Sophie Alpert, Sy Brand (and their poetry site), Julia Evans, and Lucy Zhang.
If you’re interested in reading my old blog contents still, they’ll still be on my Github as the “archived_blog” repo. I’ll freeze it as is today. EDIT: I’ve decided to take it down for now.
On that note, just over 3 and a half years after I tried this the first time: hi. My name is Joyce. Welcome to my blog.