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I’ve been a developer using web technologies for many years now, and have an understanding of how HTML, JavaScript and CSS may be bought together to give a visually appealing, easy to use, responsive site. I work with people who are wizards in this area.

I, on the other hand, have no design skills. Previous sites have been simply been places for me to make pieces available for download, and have largely been unstyled.

I dabbled with using Amaya for the HTML creation, and while it was able to aid in editing of each page, it didn’t provide enough features for me to manage an entire site.

I switched ISP in 2008, and my site vanished from the Internet along with the associated free hosting.

The next site was hosted using my own domain name, and on a server I control. I decided to start the site from scratch in 2016. The technology features are:

  • HTTP/2 support
  • SSL
  • IPv4 and IPv6

The combination of Caddy and Let’s Encrypt means that SSL is simple. I’m pleased to see it score A+ on SSL Labs server test.

However, the content was lacking. Severely lacking. The site consisted of a single page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><title>Pyrites</title></head>
<body><h1>Pyrites</h1></body>
</html>

I have some small projects that I’d like to publish some details of, and so it is time to add some content.

I decided to use Hugo as a way of generating the site. I don’t mind if my site looks identical to others using the same theme, I just want it to look reasonable and have a responsive layout.

The key features are:

  • Content easily authored using Markdown and Hugo shortcodes
  • Hugo configuration is alongside content (in Git)
  • Live reload during authoring for preview
  • Site generation is quick
  • Theme can easily be switched if required in the future

Now I have no excuse…