New Website

Introduction

I recently redesigned my website.

It uses Hugo, which is a blazingly fast static site generator written in Golang. The previous website was powered by Django, with a Postgresql database.

Hugo

Benefits of a static site generator

• Simple deployment (using rsync).
• Very few dependencies (just needs a web server for it to run).
• All content can be kept in version control.
• High performance (when being served by Nginx, a static website can scale really well even when on a puny virtual server).

Performance

Originally I was a little skeptical of Hugo. The main benefit of Hugo is performance. But how often do you actually generate the HTML files? It turns out that it’s very frequently.

In Hugo, you can make edits to your theme and content, and watch the changes automatically refresh in the browser, almost in real time. With some other static site generators you can go off and make a cup of tea while the site is being generated.

Learning Golang

The other benefits of Hugo for me were:

• A good way of learning the Golang templating language.
• A good example of a semi-mature Golang project where I could delve into the code.

Old design

I’m a digital hoarder, especially when it comes to things I’ve designed. So here are some pictures of the old website, before I made the switch. I salute you sir!