hello world

2021-12-18 | webdev

do i really need a site?

For a while now, I’ve wanted a site where I can just throw a bunch of thoughts. I’ve considered blogging platforms like Medium, Substack, Ghost, and even Mirror. But I wanted something more lowkey — something more online notebook than public blog.

A few years back, during school, I threw a jekyll site together and put a few posts up for fun, but the site was pretty much dead. A couple months back, for whatever reason, I decided to revive the site, move it to a Hugo-based theme, and made some new folders for categorizing content.

In the process, I’ve very briefly looked into SSGs (static site generators) and while it seems like Nextjs these days is reigning supreme, I didn’t want to go through the hassle of switching entirely to a different framework (but tbh I have very limited working knowledge of how jekyll/hugo even work in the first place, so…). I even considered using a Notion page as a site –> that’s the degree to which I just want a place to put thoughts easily.

We’ll see if this is the solution.

Shoutout to people on the Internet. I had some very novice questions about generating menus correctly on this site, etc and found some helpful resources (hugo documentation is elite):

PS: while trying to figure out how to deploy this site, I ran into a few options regarding the fact that Github (at least previously) didn’t allow for gh-pages deployments from non-root directories. Again, shoutout to all the beautiful souls who are so helpful:

Use git sub-repos (via worktrees) to deploy a specific folder (e.g. /public) to a specific branch (e.g. gh-pages)
- Follow general steps in discussions like this one or this one
Use the /doc directory after setting it up via repository settings
- This requires changing the output folder, which is quite easy. Link to hugo configuration details
Use Github actions/workflows, which has some prerequisite steps.

In the process, I also discovered git worktree… and I’d love to learn more.