Here’s the first post for the blog!
To start, why not describe roughly how I went about this? I considered rolling my own blog project, making something that included file system routing, tracked changes to files, included server side rendering and could push updates in real time… and then I thought “someone else has most certainly solved this in a far more elegant and robust way.” Lo and behold, for once I checked the existing solutions before spending dozens upon dozens of hours to make something myself!
This blog is made using Hugo, a static site renderer built in Go. Was this a major factor in my decision to settle on Hugo? Yeah. Sue me. More seriously, I am pleasantly surprised with the speed of Hugo! Compared to, say, Svelte (equipped with static site rendering) which takes a noticeable few seconds, this blog consistently takes under a second to render out. As in, press “enter” and the command is finished. That’s nice!
The theme of this blog is based on Gokarna, a very nice and customizable theme without a huge amount of overhead and complexity. I have edited the theme a little, but nowhere near enough to claim it as my own.
The site itself is hosted statically using nginx on a digital ocean droplet. I fear that given enough posts of photography content the poor droplet will become overloaded — when that day comes I’ll have to figure out some way to store images using a bucket, or perhaps upgrade the droplet’s storage. My other concern is data costs; sending large images is expensive! To avoid malicious actors chewing through my wallet, I’ve got both rate limiting and a credit limit on the droplet.
I think that’s about all I have to say about this so far.