This website
This website is created using Hugo, wich is based on a open-source project.
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go language. Unlike websites using its database like WordPress, Hugo does not use any database. It creates a blog site by generating static HTML pages using Markdown format content and page design templates (HTML templates and style sheets).
The advantage of a static site generator (SSG) like Hugo is that it responds to a page request from the viewer of the site with a completed HTML page that has already been generated before the request. It is possible to provide the fastest page response.
Another important advantage is the scalability of web content delivery, as each page request does not require any special processing (other than the HTTP response) on the web servers.
In addition, static web pages work well in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Since the web content distributed on this website has a lot of documents and ideas, I decided to use SSG based on these advantages of SSG.
After comparing several SSGs based on the following conditions,
- Open source and simple architecture
- Achieve site build (page generation) with fast time
- Active communities of developers and users, and lots of design templates
Hugo met these conditions, so I decided to adopt Hugo.
Design Templates
This website is using a theme (design template), PaperMod. which is publicly available in the Hugo community.
Design templates can be developed according to the technical documentation of Hugo with your favorite design and functions, but I chose this PaperMod design templates since there was something good with a simple and easy design template among many design templates in the Hugo community.
Various useful functions such as the “Like” function are added to commercial technical blog sites, which are not likely in the PaperMod designe templates, but the source code of the design template is published on GitHub, so if you will need it in the future, you can develop to add such additional required features to the designe template, based on the public source codes of the design template. At this moment, I have started with the standard functions provided in the design template.
“Use what you have, if not, develop it”
That’s the good thing about open source.
Publish your site
This site uses Netlify.
It supports building and publishing Hugo sites, as documented in the Netlify documentation.
Using the CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) function supported by Netlify, you can automatically build your Hugo site and publish your updated website when you have committed new additions or changes to the GitHub repository which contains the content files of the site.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Hugo, PaperMod, and everyone with their passion and precious time involved in developing those OSS comonents.