Hello world

I’ve finally had time to setup a blog. Past attempts were foiled by perfectionism, so this time I focused on making writing and publishing as painless as possible.

This blog is a static site generated by Hugo, it uses the Beautiful Hugo theme. Whenever a new commit is pushed to the repo, Netlify automatically rebuilds and redeploys the site. Forestry.io serves as a nice front-end for writing new posts (changes are committed behind the scenes).

Thoughts on Netlify

• Netlify is simpler to use than GitHub Pages and has fewer restrictions.
• The DNS controls are excellent and work better than my registrar’s control panel (NameCheap).
• Netlify automatically generates free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

That last point is Netlify’s greatest advantage over GitLab Pages which requires a more hands-on approach. Trying to get GitLab to verify ownership of a subdomain was a royal pain, but with Netlify it was straightforward.

Thoughts on Forestry.io

I’m less sold on this. The front-end is nice and Forestry was easy to setup, but I don’t really need a WYSIWYG editor. Markdown and vscode are good enough. However, there are some less techy people in my life that may find Forestry useful. Consider this a trial run!