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Hugo + Github Pages

So recently I found myself in the position where one of the websites I run got wiped from the face of the internet when the hosting provider deleted the VPS that it was running on.

Needless to say this was a somewhat irritating circumstance to find myself in. Whilst I did have recent backups (everyone should these days) this particular site was running on WordPress and as much as I like WordPress the thought of standing everything up from scratch on a new VM was not appealing. So I started looking at alternatives.

I’ve been playing around with Docker a lot in the past 12 months so my head initially turned to throwing up the WordPress docker container somewhere and that being the end of it. I got the site up and running locally, learned some interesting WordPress tricks in the process.

Then I started looking around at where to host it for the rest of the world to see. Quickly I realised that for an old site that very rarely gets updated it would cost more each month than I wanted to pay. So I needed a new plan.

After more searching online, I figured out that the current hotness appeared to all centre around the JAMstack and that nobody would be seen dead using a VPS these days.

Much reading later (maybe that should be months of) I decided that I was going to make myself use Hugo + GitHub Pages to make and host content. If you’re reading this, then I succeeded!

This is my first post using Markdown which I started out writing using VS Code before stumbling across StackEdit which I’ve used to finish it.

Everything I’m typing in StackEdit is being synchronised back to a private repository on GitHub (keeping a thorough record or all my horrible typographical errors as it goes) where it then runs GitHub Actions for Hugo by peaceiris to publish everything to the public repository.

All in all, I couldn’t be more impressed. It’s simpler to write content in Markdown than I was expecting so now all I have to figure out is if I want to spend the time converting the old dead site to the new ways of the world.