Small Update on Infrastructure

Last year I stopped using Wordpress and move to using a static site generator (Lektor) to manage my website. I’ve been fairly happy with this choice, even though I’ve hugely neglected my blog over the past year. This is something I hope to rectify.

The biggest problem I had was that the design of the last attempt was terrible. I am not blessed with good design talent, so my attempts to make a website inevitably failed to make something that functioned properly and didn’t look terrible. This in turn made me feel somewhat unmotivated to create content for the site, which is a bit of a shame. To remedy this, I’ve decided to lean on a template for the design aspects, which meant I had to switch to the Hugo static site generator. (Even though Lektor is a very flexible tool, it does not support page templates.) The setup is fairly similar, pages are written in Markdown format and rendered by Hugo into HTML that can be uploaded to the server.

This isn’t the only change I’ve made. I’ve also moved my hosting to Linode, after many months of consideration. This means that I have much more control over the server and can customise the way that things are served and other features that I think will be nice. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on the server to get it the way I like and set up all the other services that I want running. Lots of fun for me, but probably not much on the front end of things.

I’m going to try to be a little more rigorous about writing for my blog and update it a bit more regularly over the next few months. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes.