Hello Hugo: Starting My Static Site Generator Journey

Learning new things

Having grown up with Xanga, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com and Tumblr, then graduating to self-hosting Wordpress; using Hugo is a breath of fresh air in my blogging journey.

Fast forward to late 2023, I have been trying to wrap my head around GitHub and being more competent with CLI. At the same time, I learnt to customize the macOS terminal with OMZ and PowerLevel10k, using Nano to edit files, using SSH with keys and rsync.

My current setup

• MacBook Air 13" (mid-2012) 2GHz Dual-Core i7, 8GB DDR3, 512GB running Catalina (10.15) in clamshell mode¹
• OWLab Spring keyboard (my first Alice layout) with KTT Wine Red Linear Switches (44g actuation, 50g bottom out)
• BenQ Zowie EC1-B mouse
• Dell 24" U2415 60Hz display

Coming from someone without any coding background, I have to admit some of what I am learning are hard to grasp. But being a lifetime learner I am determined to get my projects executed!

Experimentation with Linux

My motivation to learn these new skills comes from the fact I want to setup a homelab with a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB rev 9 (which I have finally acquired at retail price after the restock surge in Q3/Q4 2023).

During the time I was waiting for the restock, I have been messing around with Linux on two old PCs from the early 2010s; a HP Slimline desktop with stock Debian 12 bookworm and a HP Mini 210-1100 netbook with the super lightweight Debian-based distro — antiX.

I learnt how to use Gparted, configure basic network configs and how window managers worked. In the end, I was able to successfully self-host Navidrome and it was exhilarating to say the least!

Raspberry Pi

During this new-found fascination with Linux, I unboxed a brand new Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2 (512MB ram) I bought 11 years ago in 2012! I found it earlier this month while unpacking old moving boxes I have in storage. It is running headless with the latest Raspberry Pi Lite in 32-bit. I installed Pi-Hole, feeling quite pleased with how it turned out! It is indeed a great first project for those starting out with the Raspberry Pi. The guides online were plentiful and relatively straightforward. SSH connection is via my MacBook Air or iPad Mini 6 with Secure ShellFish.

Creating a place to log my “technical trek”

Choosing a Static Site Generator as my Content Management System (CMS)

Having some experience with Markdown while using Obsidian (my choice of PKM which I highly recommend) and back in my college days with Mou and Nvalt for note taking — I think it is only wise to write in .md for this second blog I’m starting. (You can find me under my main handle @eclecticpassions).

Writing in the Wordpress web interface is quite finicky… I am not a fan. Trying to optimize the webpage load times is also a hassle. Recently, I discovered webrings dedicated to lightweight webpages, e.g. 250kb.club, 512kb.club and 1mb.club.

These fast, content-focused blogs piqued my interests greatly. I realized most of the sites listed are static websites, using SSGs like Jekyll or Hugo. I also recall some of my Mastodon friends have mentioned it before. Hence, I bought a new domain name on Porkbun (first time customer, liking it so far), installed Hugo (seems to be quite popular and one of the fastest SSGs around), chose a theme (Anatole) and deployed it with GitHub Pages.

Choice of domain name

It took me a day to think of a suitable name but I am quite happy with it. I think “Burgeon Lab” suits my use case quite well.

Burgeon (verb) — Begin to grow or increase rapidly; flourish.

I will treat it as a place where I can document my side projects and share my progress.

Setting up GitHub Actions

Being able to run a local instance of my Hugo site was relatively straightforward, but I had quite a bit of troubleshooting headaches before I got the Hugo directory working on my GitHub Pages repo. Read Set up GitHub Pages with Hugo using GitHub Actions to learn how I did it in the end.

First two projects

To start off, I will be documenting these two topics:

1. Setting up and using Hugo as a beginner coming from Wordpress

2. Setting up self-hosted services on my Raspberry Pi 4B with Docker and Portainer, acting as my first ever homelab server

Thanks for reading. If you intend to follow along, please follow my blog’s feed with your favourite RSS aggregator/reader app;. or follow me on Mastodon where I will be post updates.