I didn’t think that there’d be anything to say on the housekeeping front so early in the life of this blog, but a lot has changed over the last couple of days.

The chances are that no one will have noticed the changes, as things are still in their early days, and it is unlikely that there have been any visitors yet. But for the single person reading this in 10 years time, this blog started its life on Blogger, before moving to its current home.

There are a couple of reasons for this move. A lot of my spare time is spent in web development for a number of different projects, which for confidentiality reasons I am not going to mention here. This has had two effects in creating this blog. First, I wanted a simple platform on which to write, where I would not have to deal with the programming issues associated with my scientific work, or the design issues associated with the web development that I work on in my free time. The obvious answer to this was a simple, premade platform, and Blogger filled this role perfectly, or so it seemed. That brings us on to the problem, and the second effect, namely that using a premade blogging platform felt very restrictive. I set out to create a blog that I wanted to read, a blog that was visually appealing, simple but attractive in design, and at every turn I found myself wanting to customise the Blogger templates beyond what was permitted. OK, the obvious second choice was something like Wordpress, but the maintenance associated with a Wordpress site that I had customised to my liking felt too much for a very small side project. Between these two possibilities, I became paralysed: I did not want to write the blog where it was, because it felt ugly and unfinished, but I didn’t want to move it because the work felt too much, so nothing happened, and nothing was written. At the end of all of this, a little voice said to me “Wasn’t there some website building software called Hugo that you worked with a while ago? Why not give that a try again?”.

Now static websites have always appealed to me. The simplicity of uploading a few files to a server, setting up Apache or Nginx and immediately being able to browse without any code compilation, and the associated inevitability of bugs and vulnerabilities, is, to me, when the internet is at its best. On top of that, using Hugo, it becomes very easy to produce a website using Github Pages, which not only entirely removes the need for server maintenance, but has the added benefit of being entirely free.Yes! Hugo was the way to go.

The upshot of this decision is a site that is much more polished in some small ways than where it came from (it has its own domain name for one) while being far from production ready in others (I am not a great fan of the premade theme that I chose, and will probably do a considerable amount of work customising it to my liking in the coming weeks).

It is likely that some other things will change around here as well. Firstly, I am experimenting with the use of images in my posts. I’m not sure how much I like the result yet, and the number of photos I have available is minimal, but we will see. I will also be playing around with the design of the site for a bit, seeing what works and what doesn’t and hopefully ending up with something that is passably visually pleasing.

In any case, this has proved to be a much longer post than I intended, and that is without going into any of the nerdy details of building and managing a static site, so I will sign off now. Perhaps in future I will write a deep dive into the workings of Hugo as a static site generator, or perhaps not. I do not know.

Last modified on 2025-06-11