…but it’s not what you think. Let me explain.

This is the first post with this new page and the experience in setting this up was really good.

I’ve heard about Hugo and Jekyll before but never really bothered what they are and how they work. Since setting up a new personal website was part of my plan for this year anyways, I dedicated one weekend to do so. I already had some experience in setting up simple HTML pages for API calls, so the initial plan was to use multiple iterations of ChatGPT back & forth to step-by-step refine the new personal page.

It turns out, ChatGPT quite sucks in setting up a page from scratch despite multiple rounds of prompt engineering and even when using it to adjust pre-made HTML & CSS templates it never really gets it right. Apart from that, hosting all contents & html pages in my small VPC turned out to be quite cumbersome regarding maintenance and updating new page contents. After seeing the Hugo Papermod being used by a former colleague I decided to give it a shot…

Why I love Hugo

  • It was really easy to install using the scoop package manager.
  • It uses markdown, which is really easy to use and already known from Juypter notebooks and readme files
  • During setup and new page creation you get live updates, when opening a browser window with localhost:1313 next to your edits because hugo server will recognize changes after each change and automatically update your page.
  • I was still able to customize the gallery with vanilla HTML, CSS & JS.
  • Updating with GitHub workflows works really well and it’s cool to know, that after each push the page is live instantly.

I’m sure there’s many more things, but these are the ones that came to my mind after setting up this site within a couple of hours during the weekend.