The blog is back!

After a long break (my last blog post was from 2015) I decided to pick up blogging again. And of course this meant I had an excuse to try something new 😁

My first blog was a wordpress blog, hosted by wordpress. Then i switched to a static site using Jekyll on github.

This time I am still going for a static website using Hugo. Most of my professional work uses Azure, so I wanted to also host my blog there using a static web app.

Hugo

I did not spend a whole lot of time picking a static site generator to be honest. I wanted something easy and fast and found Hugo.

And, my god, it’s fast…

Hugo logo

Written in GO, but that is an implementation detail when you use it, since you just install the binaries.

I installed the latest version using Chocolaty on my windows machine.

Setting up Hugo on Azure

On Azure I am using an Azure Static Web App. This is easy to integrate with GitHub so it can automatically trigger a new release on a commit to my git repo.

Azure Static Web Apps is currently in preview, so no pricing info is known yet. For now it’s free

To set it up I followed these steps. As a theme I went with GhostWriter.

Since the GhostWriter theme has a lot of settings you can tinker with I replaced my config.toml in the root of my blog with the config.yml provided in the themes/ghostwriter folder. I also copied the sample content pages over from the themes folder into my own content folder.

Using the command hugo server I verified all was working well locally.

And then I pushed my changed and watched how all the glorious machinery spun into action to deploy my fresh website.

Issues

When I opened up my blog on azure I was greeted by an empty page.

The Developer Tools from my browser showed me my requests where blocked because they where cross origin. I forgot to change the baseurl in my config.yml, which wasn’t a problem locally. Changing the setting and pushing to github triggered the glorious machinery again and my page was working!

Then I started writing this blog post, but when i checked it out locally I could not see it. Turns out I had set the date of the post to be in the future (because it was still a draft) which is why the post was still invisible.

Adding a custom domain

In the next post we’ll see how we can add a custom domain to our shiny new blog!