Lessons Learned - Simplifying My Blog

In this post I will provide an overview on how I have simplied my blog management.

My previous tech stack

I had contemplated using Hugo initially when building my blog the first time round.

My initial plans were to host my blog on GitHub sites, but discovered it was more complex to do so with Hugo. So instead I chose to utilise Jekyll and for some reason decided to change my approach to how I was hosting the blog. At the time, I believe Azure Pipelines introduced the pipeline as code feature and I decided to have a mess around with it within this project to further my knowledge.

This was my original cheap and cheerful blog tech stack and whilst it worked pretty well for the most part, there were a number of flaws behind the scenes. These were annoying things such as difficulties previewing my posts whilst on the move (device related), fairly slow pipelines, and stale files being left in the the Azure Blob Storage Account. The most major issue being the difficulty in previewing posts whilst on the move, as this really discouraged me from posting frequently.

New tech stack

This stack is just so much more simple. I run hugo serve -D on my Surface Go which allows me to preview my posts on the move without installing additional dependencies (thanks Go!). When I’m happy with the preview, I push to a branch in a GitHub repo. Create a PR, preview it in Netlify if I wish to, merge to master, and the changes ae usually made live within a minute.

It was so simple to get started by following Hugo’s Host on Netlify guide. It even handles the SSL using LetsEncrypt and custom domains and best of all, it’s free! No this is not a sponsored post, I am just genuinely a happy user of Netlify’s hosting service.

#tech #lessons learnt