How I Build My Blog with Hugo?
Previously I’ve used Blogspot for my blogs. I’m not a very active blogger, I have just a few entry in Turkish at Blogspot. Recently I decided to share more things regularly with my blog posts both in Turkish and English and also improve my sharing environment. I’ve wanted to keep my entries with my full control, not in an external environment such as Blogspot, Wordpress, Medium etc. Also, I’ve wanted to use my own domain name and I thought mucahit.io is the most simple and meaningful alternative for me. I had my own domain names before but I couldn’t use them actively.
I’ve wanted to use simple tools and designs for my all needs. With a little research, I decided to use a static site generator with a simple theme. I’ve started to use Hugo with Hyde theme. The other powerful alternative in static website generator area is Jekyll. I didn’t compare these two so much, maybe because of my interest in Go, I remember more things about Hugo and select Hugo :). There is no need for any other tool to locally develop and preview your website. Just for comments you have to use an external tool, I integrated Disqus for this purpose and this is very easy with Hugo, you just write your Disqus short name to the config.toml file.
Hugo is simple and powerful. At first sight, it can be little complicated for non-technical background people. With Hugo basically, you write your posts with markdown format and Hugo generate HTML files from these markdown files. Hugo also has some shortcodes that are you can use in markdown files to generate some HTML components easily, such as figure, youtube video, tweet, Instagram links etc.
There are a few alternatives to host Hugo websites. I selected Netlify in this area, because of its simple and free service. I use Bitbucket private repo to keep my website files. Netlify provides a continuous deployment platform integrated with Bitbucket repo(of course with other alternatives Github, Gitlab too). When you integrate Netlify with your Bitbucket repo, Netlify automatically checks changes on your master branch and if there is any change automatically build and deploy your Hugo website to your production environment. Netlify also provided free HTTPS service.
Also, Fatih Arslan’s blog post about his Hugo experience and his website’s design made my decision and building process easy.