Setting up a Personal Blog - So Simple Even Kids Do It

Yes, you read it correctly. This post is not a tutorial to help you write a blog post but to build a blog site.

But still. A personal blog? Why do you need to host one on your own? Can’t you easily write on in dev.to or hashnode.com or medium.com?

All these were the questions I had when I decided to start writing blogs. A friend helped me set up an account on Medium and helped me write my first Blog post. She did all the writing for me. I just gave her the content.

I was happy with it, but I wanted to try more things. That is when I came across tutorials on CMS(Content Management Systems) and SSG(Static Site Generators) that make blogging easier for you. You can write your content as a markdown file. The CMS will take care of all the formatting and embedding. This way, you can post your blogs without any hassles with web development.

Out of all the CMS available out there, Hugo caught my attention because of the following features they had shown on their website:

1. Builds an average site in less than a second
2. Open-source SSG
3. Write content in the markdown syntax

Setting up a barebone site was very easy with tutorials like this that help you to get started with Hugo. You can set up a site template and forget about it. You can focus on the content. All the other website-related work will be automatically handled by Hugo very effectively.

The first post I wanted to add was simple. I just copied the whole blog post I had on Medium and reformatted it to markdown to use in this new Hugo template. With some adjustments in text and also after adding an image, my first Hugo blog with one blog post was ready.

The next task was to host it somewhere to show my new cool project to all my friends and family. I didn’t go for a custom domain name. I chose to get a static site hosting solution since I don’t expect any data input from the user.

The first option I thought of trying was 000webhost by Hostinger. It gives you the option to choose a template to get started. But I was looking for a barebone setup since I already have my static site ready. I gave it a try. I decided to leave this option because of three main reasons.

1. The domain name you receive for the free tier is https://{project_name}.000webhostapp.com which wasn’t something easy to remember.
2. Every time I update my website, I’ll have to get the updated files and replace the site data on the project manually. They provide an option to update the website data through FTP, but you should upgrade to paid tier to use it.
3. I got into a bug that locks you out of the project even if you give the correct password. This issue was posted and fixed long back in their forum. But I came across it when I was testing it. I couldn’t log back in.

Because of these three reasons, I left 000webhost for an alternative. The next choice was Netlify. It was so much better than The former. I loved the UI and ease of uploading builds through the premade GitHub actions workflow. But something felt odd. The URL of my blog site was https://{project_name}.netlify.app. It was better than the previous one. Still, it felt odd to me. And that’s what convinced me to use GitHub pages to host my website. With this option, my website will be https://{my_username}.github.io. It was better than all the others. GitHub also had an easier way to update changes to the website with its workflow script. This new workflow updates my website when I push new changes to GitHub.

I didn’t have to change anything after the initial setup. I’m happy to report that Hugo made me want to write more because of its simplicity and effectiveness in creating websites with it. All I do now is create a new markdown file under the posts subfolder. Everything gets updated when I push the changes. How much easier can this get? With this setup, even small kids can publish their writings for free on the internet.

In this era of advanced technologies, you should have a simple site you can call yours. If this doesn’t motivate you to build a website on your own, I don’t know what will. I hope you all try Hugo once and start writing more. Contact me through Discord if you need help setting up your blog site.

Stay safe. Enjoy life.