This Website Launch

This website is finally ready for some usage above serving homepage and contacts page.

It was a long time since the first version of my website was launched. I made it in the 9th grade at school, using Python and Django. Later I tried other approaches, and even wrote magi, a CGI library, since I wanted to create a “truly-my-own” website. Today I am settled on Hugo, a static site generator written in Go.

I found it convenient enough to use, it is fast, simple and pleasantly customizable. It is also quite convenient to make the changes to the website — I use git repository for managing both the sources of it and the generated content. The trick here was to place the repository in the directory which is served by my webserver, and then configure the repo in such a way that it is updating its directory each time a commit is received. This was done simply by:

git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead

To keep the webserver being able to access the files from public directory you may also need to create a .git/hooks/post-receive with:

#!/bin/sh
chgrp -R webserver_group /path/to/your/repository

I would also like to recommend the webserver I use, Caddy, which is extremely easy to set up and configure, and the best part is that you don’t have to worry about certificates for HTTPS at all — they are obtained automatically!

Finally, I would like to mention a way to incorporate a search on your site, which I found quite satisfying and use on this site — one can use plain HTML to send requests to DuckDuckGo to search only on the specified site:

<form action="https://duckduckgo.com/" method="get">
  <input type="search" name="q" placeholder="Search...">
  <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="example.com">
</form>

The look of this website is inspired by elementary OS; I had used it for around two years, and I find their aesthetics quite appealing.