Switching to Hugo

I have owned this domain since 2007. I know it sat essentially unused for a number of years after registration. I parked the domain shortly after getting it. As best as I can recall, it remained parked with “Under construction” displayed for a few years. In 2012, I started a Wordpress blog on it. I did not make a lot of posts, but I do remember the server having a raid card failure that took everything down, including the array that handled my back-ups. I moved out of colocation and onto a free tier Amazon Web Services (AWS). Between this move and personal/work related things, this domain got lost in the mix and once again sat unused for a while.

When I started back at school, several of my classes and professors pushed the idea of a digital portfolio. One of my classes centered around setting it up, posting to it, and sharing it for a grade. They all pushed hard for Wordpress. After installing Wordpress on an AWS Compute VM, I was less than impressed with the performance but I didn’t have time to figure something else out. For several months, I worked around the poor performance before I finally caved after a failed update caused significant issues.

After coming to terms with the fact that I needed to buckle down and find a better solution, I began looking around. At first, I was just aimlessly looking at various CMS solutions. I did not have an idea of what I really wanted, aside from something simple. I quickly realized I was going to spend too much time looking if I didn’t do a bit more thinking first. I knew I wanted something simple and did not need a ton of features/fancy UI. I narrowed my search and found Grav. It didn’t take me long before I had a much more responsive and functional solution in place. I liked it.

Just a few days ago, I went to add some content to my portfolio when I wanted to see about making some changes to the design I was using, Grav Coder. What I was looking to do turned out to be impossible, but while I was researching it, I stumbled upon the Grav theme Webfolio by Jason Cox. On his blog, he wrote about his move from Grav to a simple static site. The more I read, the more I realized I was in the same boat he was. I don’t have a need for fancy graphics or user interface, nor do I have any need for dynamic content. In all, it took me about 10 minutes to get everything up and running with minimal content.

Now that I’m using proper source code management to handle changes, I can also have that same system test and deploy my site any time I make a change. In my case I’m using Gitlab CI/CD to accomplish this. I save my changes and Gitlab takes care of the rest.

[This page was last updated on June 21, 2023.]