Every blog needs a first post, and what better subject to record than the birth of this blog.
Last weekend, I was reading a particular reddit post and noticed the OPs username forfunc. I’ve also been watching (and loving!) @francesc’s JustForFunc channel. I like the wordplay and thought myself very clever indeed when I came up with “for func sake”…
It just so happened that the username was available in the places I want to use it; and I’ve been less than thrilled with my previous username choice(s)… so I spent an hour or so creating new accounts across the web. Step 1, done.
With the username locked in - I needed a project for it. I’ve been writing a bit of go for my job and soaking in as much as I can from various blogs, subreddits, GopherFest livestreams, GopherCon talk videos and open source projects - and I feel like the time has come to contribute something back. I don’t know what that contribution will be yet - but I figure that when I do find my pet project, I’m going to want to share it - so Step 2 is the blog.
What follows is a (probably not as brief as it should be) overview of how I got from that point to publishing this post:
“I’m going to start a blog… so now what?”
At around 21:00 yesterday (AEST), I decided to google “host blog on github”. Turns out.. it’s a thing and wasn’t about to break any new ground. I discovered that Jekyll is the “default” static generator provided by GitHub Pages - then remembered reading something about Hugo a few months back. Considering I’m all in on go right now, I knew I should dig deeper.
At 21:15 I was here -> https://opensource.com/article/17/5/hugo-vs-jekyll
At 21:20, here -> https://www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/jekyll-ghpages-to-hugo-netlify/ and thinking that I might need to look up netlify, having never heard of it before.
It quickly became clear that Hugo was going to be my tool of choice - and github pages would be my publisher to start with.
By 22:00, I had just viewed a “working” local site from following the Hugo Quickstart Guide. I also couldn’t help but notice that while it walks the reader through setting up on GitHub Pages… the guide itself is deployed with Netlify… [pause for effect] interesting.
Pause is also what happened to the site - it was time to get some sleep.
Around 21:00 this evening I was ready to resume; but I was also in the middle of grinding dailes in Hearthstone… because, double gold!
By 21:50 I had chosen an initial theme, Bootstrap4, started config customisation and realised that I’m probably going to want a disqus account - which I finally set up while in the middle of typing out this sentence.
It’s now 23:30 and again time for me to sleep - so I’ll wrap up here - noting that my next post will be the step-by-step of how I publish to GH Pages.
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