José María Martín Luque

At some point during the past week, I had an idea for a blog post. Then I realized I did not have a blog. My old site was just an HTML file I had manually written, as if we were living in the early 2000s. The website had nothing more.

But if I wanted to write a blog I needed something more sohpisticated. Manually coding the HTML for every post I wanted was out of the question. As it was some kind of CMS like Wordpress: that was too complicated. I simply wanted to write about computer science-related topics I came across at work or in my free time and be able to host them as plain HTML files.

I had experimented with static site generators in the past, including Jekyll and Hugo, but I found Jekyll outdated and Hugo more complex than necessary. I believed that a simple Bash script that used Pandoc to parse a few Markdown files and generate HTML would suffice.

However, I soon discovered that it was not as easy as I thought. I am not very fluent in Bash, so I did a search to look for some pre-made scripts. The options I found included Barf, which seemed to meet my needs, but then I learned that it was not portable since it relied on GNU versions of sed and date, which are not included by default on macOS. Since I work on both Windows, using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and macOS, I needed a solution that would work on both platforms without requiring additional software or modifications.

Then I considered implementing my own generator in Go, a language I am familiar with, or in Rust, which would be a good opportunity to learn. However, I quickly realized that this would be a time-consuming endeavor. As some people pointed out to me, did I really want to spend a lot of time writing the generator instead of writing blog content?

Eventually, I decided to give Hugo another try, and was pleasantly surprised that it was not as complex as I remembered. The hugo new commands were useful to create a site and theme boilerplate that I could modify easily. In fact, I was able to create a working version of my blog, complete with the design I wanted (heavily inspired by the Berkeley Graphics website), in just one morning.

And that is how I ended up with the blog you are currently reading. With the technical details sorted out (which, in the end, was the easy part), the hard part is yet to come: continuing to write more content. See you soon!