Why a website?

Simply because I want to have one. I want to write about my interests and have been for a bit privately, and I’ve been thinking maybe, just maybe, there might be someone interested in reading them.

The start

Getting this thing online was way more of a journey than I thought it would be. I had originally made my first website using Grav, and while there’s a lot to like about it, it didn’t really “wow” me. Don’t get me wrong, the sites it generates look very nice and are plenty fast, but its designed around supporting features I simply do not need. Thus, I started searching for a different tool.

The options

I looked at a few options:

1. WordPress - Security nightmare, don’t want to deal with a database. Figured out I wanted static sites, so this was an immediate no.
2. Ghost - Not clear how the self-hosted option works, and the themes are conventionally pretty but extremely boring. Nope.
3. Astro - Same thing. BORING
4. 11ty - Not quite what I was looking for, but there’s some nice stuff there.
5. Jekyll - Heard about this one from YouTube, looked like what I wanted, but found out it was a bit old and lacking support.
6. Hugo - Found this when looking at Jekyll. Got the stastic site generation I was looking for, and easily extensible themes that I liked as a baseline

Hugo won out, so what happened then?

My first hugo site

While I was searching through themes, I came across a terminal interface site and I loved it too much not to use it. You can see it here or you can click the terminal link at the top. I added some customization options I wanted that weren’t there originally, contributed to the theme’s source, and then set my own up. Problem is, its not a fantastic way to read a blog, especially if you aren’t familiar with command line interfaces. Also, its mostly unusable on a phone, so I really “needed” a theme for a second site.

This website

Searching for the theme for this site was terrible. Its not that there weren’t good theme options; the problem was that there’s a ton of them. I knew generally how I wanted the site to look, so I was able to eliminate most of them. But the ones left over were impossible to choose from. I knew I would need to add features to whichever I chose, so I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on one I ended up not liking, and analysis paralysis set in. I started with the fraktur theme, then switched to terminal, then to the console theme, then back to the fraktur theme and customized it a bit, then switched back and forth between it and the other two. I got stuck, but then when I was about to settle for the terminal theme, I found this theme through a lucky search. Toward the bottom of the results, I saw a link to a self-hosted git repo and knew I need to check it out. I was right. I finally broke the analysis loop and could get to work.

What’s next?

Well, now its time to write. First, I have some plans to write a longer piece about this season’s WGI Percussion finals, which wrap up the day after writing this. I’ve also got fledglings of some more technical posts I want to write, and I’d like to write some album and video game reviews. All of that in time, but for now, I’m happy to get this site out on the internet.