Creating a personal website

I wanted to start documenting our move from the US to UK, so I started pondering the idea of creating a personal website. Fortunately, I’m also currently on a break between jobs so I figured this is as good a time as any.

So I started by simple google searches to look at options to create a personal site. I also spoke to some of my cousins that have some good websites to see what they used and their experiences with it. From this, I figured out that I could move forward with one of two main choices.

Pay a provider like squarespace, wordpress or Wix.
Go the cheaper but slower DIY route.

Since I’m not trying to monetize the site, I didn’t necessarily need the fancier features and conveniences that the providers offer. I also figured I’d learn a lot more with the DIY route.

So I decided to build it with Hugo, Github and Cloudflare Pages

More details below if you are looking to DIY and create a personal website as well.

Step 1: Registering the domain name #

I didn’t want to spend too much time on this, mostly looked at GoDaddy and Cloudflare. Cloudflare has a pretty generous free tier and they provide a bunch of security features out of the box. It is also a company I generally admire and would potentially consider working at in the future. So figured it was a good time to use them and build my familiarity with them.

Step 2: Creating the website itself #

The Easy Route: Squarespace, WordPress.com, and similar services offer beautiful templates and user-friendly tools. I created a trial account on squarespace and got the basic skeleton of a site pretty quickly. Could’ve probably built a gorgeous looking and functional site within a day or two, but it’d also require me to pay 15-20$ a month.
The DIY route: While looking for options to register the domain name I also found out that Cloudflare had a product called Pages geared towards front end developers to build and deploy websites. More importantly, it directly connects to a git repository so once you connect it with a repo, it automatically keeps the site updated with the changes to the repo. I’m a big proponent of the gitops approach at work. So this was just perfect for me.

Cloudflare pages seemed to integrate pretty well with Hugo which is a framework for building static sites. So I figured I’d just try building something with it. I had never done any front-end development or even built static sites before but after some initial confusion and going through the hugo docs it took me about 2-3 days with other distractions to have something functional.

Step 3: Publishing the site #

Building and publishing the site was relatively trivial. I mostly just followed the instructions here

Things I’m still working on #

Create appropriate categories and tags, so folks can easily find a set of related articles, e.g. all technical posts, all posts on moving from US to UK, etc
Figure out how to set up RSS feeds and subscriptions etc
Turn on comments etc (this one is a maybe, not sure just yet if I want it)

If you’re curious to create your own site and need some help, or have experience building your own site with hugo please don’t hesitate to reach out. I would love to help or have the opportunity to get some ideas and inspiration :)