yoranbrondsema.com v2.0

Unfortunately I was too laxist with renewing the hosting that this website was previously using. By the time I wanted to renew, it was too late and the entire site had been deleted by the hosting provider, including the database. This means that all the content that was on there was lost. This is a shame and I take the blame for it. My only consolation is that a lot of the posts were about Ember.js and Ruby on Rails development and therefore were more or less outdated by now.

However, I take this as a chance to revamp the blog. It was previously powered by Wordpress but in hindsight that was a bit overkill for a simple blog. Instead, I now focused on simplicity and therefore chose to use Hugo, the static site generator. It’s the first time that I use a static site generator and we’ll see how it plays out. However, it already makes me happy that I can type this in my favorite editor Vim. It is a little ironic though as during the day I work on Sutori, a full Javascript single-page application built on Ember.js.

Hosting

The domain name is registered via OVH.com for which I pay €7.99 per year. This comes with 10 MB of free hosting so for now that is my only cost. We’ll see how long this will last me but it’s also an incentive to keep things minimal.

Deployment

The free hosting plan has its limitations so I can only deploy via FTP. This takes me back to the days of when I made my first websites! Back in the day I was dragging the files from left to right but now I know better luckily.

I am using hugodeploy to deploy the website to the FTP server. FTP is not a quick protocol so it’s good that it only uploads files that have changed in between deployments.

I keep the source of the blog on a public GitHub repository so I perform a deployment after each Git push:

# .git/hooks/pre-push

hugo
hugodeploy

Update (Nov 30th 2017): The blog is now hosted on Netlify.

Conclusion

It’s a shame the old blog was deleted but it’s an opportunity to start afresh. I’m already in love with the immediacy of a static site generator. I press :wq on Vim and with only one command, the changes are live and deployed.