Another summer, another excuse to tinker with my website. I’ve used pelican, a python static site generator, to run this website for nearly six years. It’s a great tool. But I dislike python dependency hell, and pelican is a bit slow. So I’ve looked elsewhere. Hugo is blazing fast, has a thriving community, decent templates, and a downloadable binary that you can get via homebrew. No more dependency management! Also important for me (as an emacs user), there is a great org-mode exporter—ox-hugo—that lets me easily generate the web content from an org-file. On the whole I’ve been very happy with the move.
I’ve also changed hosting from github to Netlify, which provides dead-simple hosting. All you do is point it at a git repository (which remains on Github) and tell it what commands to run and it provides continuous deployment. So whenever I make a change to the site and push that change to my repository on Github Netlify automatically regenerates the site. Very cool. Plus, easy https for a more secure site.