I’ve had a blog before. I’ve tried sticking to posting stuff regularly. It didn’t work at all.

That’s why this time around I want to do it a little differently. I mainly want to do this just for myself. If anyone finds something useful or interesting, then be my guest and continue reading my ramblings for as long as you wish but this time around I will try to spend as little time as possible on correcting my mistakes and looking for better ways to express certain thoughts, as this was what cost me the most time and in the end made it much less enjoyable the last time I tried.

I’ve set up this blog with the wonderful static site generator framework called HUGO. I’ve used it before to create my professional resume and have been happy with it over the years.

Even though I have some coding experience, I have never been all to interested in front end and web development, so from the beginning on it was a great experience using this framework and taking advantage of one of the many themes that great people from the community ported over to work with HUGO.

One of the things I like most about HUGO is that all your content is written in Markdown, which is IMO probably the best format around when it comes to formatted text with metadata. I use Markdown for my notes and will probably write about my Markdown workflow and the software I use at a later date.

Another advantage is that the main setup of the page is done with a single config file written in YAML, although it can be done with TOML and YAML as well. I really like this approach, as I am a System Administrator by trade and having a single config file makes it easier to deploy my websites automatically with tools like Ansible.

After creating a blank new site with HUGO you can then just choose a theme you like. Previously I had chosen a theme called ‘Hello Friend’. I liked that fact that it had a dark/light mode toggle and the overall look, but the theme repository itself was kind of unstructured and I didn’t like the way the blog page looked.

For the restart of my blog I have now taken to another theme called ‘Stack’ by Jimmy Cai which looks and feels great so far.

I hope you like it too!

Cheers,
Matthias