If you remember the old version of bsahin.xyz, you probably remember a blogpost titled Webpage Generation for Lazy People, which was essentially a tutorial for using pandoc to generate standalone webpages from a markdown file. While my old website consisting of a few “lazily generated” pages and some handwritten HTML received compliments on its use of duck.gif, I felt that the website would become convoluted as I added more and more pages. And frankly, I became even lazier so I didn’t want to edit index.html by hand every time I added some content.

So I started looking for a static site generator. I had some criteria for picking one, which were:

  • It must support a variety of file formats. While I mostly use markdown, I prefer to write longer pages using org-mode. There are a few places where I resort to plain HTML as well (namely the letter grade calculators).
  • It must be easily customizable. I don’t want to give up the now-iconic texture.jpg and I want my homepage to be more than a list of blog entries (and it should contain duck.gif of course!).
  • Supporting multilingual sites would be a nice bonus, as I plan to have articles in both English and Turkish at some point.

I narrowed the possible SSGs down to Hugo and Jekyll. I ended up going with Hugo because it supported org-mode and seemed easier to use and configure. Since there wasn’t much content in my old website to begin with, I decided to start from scratch (I did import the final calculators, no worries there.). Once I finish the about section and configure a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the website for every commit in master, the new bsahin.xyz will be complete. Hopefully this will get me to write more often.