Hello World!

As with all good new endeavours, hello world!

I've wanted to get a personal website up and running for a while. I like good minimalistic, aesthetic websites where people can easily read and learn. Blogs like Bartosz Ciechanowski, Marc Brooker, and Tim Bray blogs stand out here. I'd also like for it to be easy to maintain and low-cost (ideally no-cost) to host.

However, the problem is I have the front-end design skills of a potato and am not currently inclined to learn how to build such a blog. Site generators like wordpress I find aren't minimalist enough both in setup nor aesthetic for my tastes, and ideally the entire blog would be maintained as code to make it easy to deploy and scale.

~~Recently the awesome Material MkDocs project released the blog feature as part of the main feature set thanks to growing sponsor support. With this, I've come up with a simple, zero-maintenance way to host a blog. It uses~~

• ~~Material MkDocs to provide the static page generation~~

• Github to host the code~~

• CloudFlare for DNS registration and static site hosting

I'm testing getting github and cloudflare hooked together to allow me to write posts in markdown and use github Actions to automatically update the website.

Update: I've since moved to using Franklin.jl to generate the site. It's a Julia-based static site generator that allows me to write posts in markdown and deploy them to Github Pages. It's a bit more involved than MkDocs, but I like the style and flexibility it provides. My theme is based on that of Robert Moss, who was kind enough to lend me the code to bootstrap the site.