My previous site was a total nightmare to maintain, I got a bit wild with my ideas, I thought it would be cool to have a component based blog system, well it was cool at the time, the issue was I ended up building an interface that was very clunky to work with, therefore it has taken me a lot of effort to write a simple blog post as each blog page was built up with different component for different kind of content for example, text (Markdown), images and youtube video.

I mean I can honestly say I was over ambitious, I thought I had the site well-thought-out, but the reality is that the site was difficult for one person to maintain alone, I had to constantly make sure that the database software is up-to-date, and it was hard for me to find the time to do it. I can’t just update them in one step, it’s has to be done in multiple steps and that has taken a lot of my time, and I don’t get much time nowadays because I work most of the weekdays and sometimes weekend, and I also have other commitments as well, I like to draw, learn how to play the guitar which is not going well at the moment 😂, play video games when I’m feeling a little stressed, to be honest that doesn’t happen much nowadays, I like to take my dog for a walk, go for a bike ride and study Japanese.

The other issue with building your own blog system that you intend to run on a server, is that you got to have that unhealthy obsession with security, I mean nobody wants their property getting hacked into, that in itself can have hugh consequences such as lost in finance, which is unlikely to a site that does not make much money anyway, but still I don’t want to get hacked.

Do I regret building my own blog system? No I don’t regret it at all, it’s actually been an amazing experience, as I do enjoy programming, I felt that I have learned a lot from it and working with Google Go Programming Language that I happen to prefer over say Node.Js, I might talk about that some other time. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. 😂

What do you use now? I use Hugo and it’s been great, I did have a few small issue, I work them out at the end. Being able to write content in pure Markdown, manually copying and pasted images to a folder, and being able to save them to a Git repository, it’s a godsend really. After I have written some content, I use Hugo to generate static HTML and some XML feeds and deploy it with a rsync command, it’s just really nice, as I don’t have to worry about maintaining a couple of databases.

I have written the command in the script file and save it to the repository.

#!/bin/dash
export HUGO_ENV=production
hugo && rsync -avz --no-perms --no-owner --no-group --delete public/ [email protected]:~/www/

I can just run the command inside the terminal of my IDE of choice, that happens to be WebStorm in my case. Hugo seems to take care of the highlight for you, that awesome, save me from a lot of research cost. It’s just soo much cleaner then Wordpress, I’ll get to that someday. 😊

Anyway I look forward to writing more blog post.