New blog with HUGO

A dear friend told me that HUGO is how blogging is done today and as it was time to finally move away from Blogger, I decided to give it a spin. Hugo is a static site generator that uses Markdown as its authoring format. While I certainly have my reservations against Markdown (or anything that is not XML, for that matter), I’ll gladly admit that it makes creating content very easy. This may help my goal of writing and publishing more, so there.

HUGO is a static site generator, so it takes a bunch of input files and creates HTML files that can then be deployed on any web server. The design of the output can be customized by themes, and there is a large number of prexisting templates to choose from. I’m going with Cupper for now, as I like the style and it works well both on the desktop and on mobile.

In order to make publishing as easy as possible for me, I’m hosting the source code for my website on GitHub, using a webhook to run HUGO on my web server that runs Apache using a trivial CGI shell script:

#!/bin/sh

echo Content-Type: text/plain
echo

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
cd /usr/local/www/site/netzhansa.com
git pull
hugo

I was happy to learn that, according to Wikipedia, Apache is still serving some 30% percent of the Web. Not wanting to support the operations of my Web server too much, I’m going for the mainstream choice.

So here you have it, and I have one excuse less not to write about my projects. I’m sure that some of the things will be interesting to some of my friends.