Hello World

A while back, I was asked to build a Squarespace site for a client. During the process of identifying their needs, I decided to create a personal website for myself to gain some familiarity with the Squarespace offering. All things considered, I was pleased with my experience. The developer platform enabled me to meet all of my client’s requirements, and training them to use their new website was a painless experience. After the project ended, I decided to keep my personal website running, and so it has been for the last few years.

More recently, I’ve established a personal goal of being more transparent with the ways I’m occupying my time professionally. When I find a useful tool or a solve a difficult problem, I want to make it a priority to share that with friends, colleagues, and whoever else may visit my website. When I spend my time on the weekends working on a game mechanic or interesting interactive piece, I want to be able to share that as well. While my overall experience with Squarespace was positive, I felt it was starting to get in my way. I needed a replacement, so I started to look around to see what others were using. I found Hugo.

Hugo

Hugo is a fast and flexible static website generator that is ideal for blogs, portfolios, and product websites. As someone who uses the Go Programming Language every day, I was introduced to Hugo when I started noticing that a few fellow gophers were using it for their blogs. After reading up on it, I knew I wanted to give it a try.

I highly recommend checking out the Hugo Quickstart Guide as it’s a fantastic resource, but here is what the general process of standing up a website looks like.

1. Install Hugo (OSX)
   brew update && brew install hugo
2. Create your project
   hugo new site your-project-name
3. Install a theme in the themes folder
   
4. Update your config.toml
   
5. Create your first post
   hugo new post/your-post-name.md
6. Test the server locally
   hugo server
7. Generate your website and deploy to your host
   hugo

Once you have hugo installed and a test project running, you’ll begin to benefit from the many great features Hugo has to offer. Given what I had become accustomed to, it was refreshing working with such a lightweight tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s light on capability. With hugo, you can easily:

• Write blog content in markdown.
• Host custom project pages.
• Control site structure.
• Customize HTML templates and CSS.
• Work offline in a local environment.

The end result of all of this is an improved workflow thats makes it easy to create and update content on my local machine. When the time comes to publish my changes, building the site is just a simple command away. I’m excited to continue exploring all of the features Hugo has to offer, and I’m feeling empowered by the tools I have at my disposal. As a case in point, I’m already accomplishing some of the goals I set for myself:

• Goal: Tell others about Hugo.

Moving Forward

Be sure to check my site for more frequent updates moving forward. In the near future, I plan to share a few things I’ve been making using Three.js, a very useful JavaScript library for creating 3D graphics. Until then, thanks for stopping by!