My website was stuck in the early 2000s. GoDaddy, Dreamhost, SFTP, and an .htaccess file! I kid you not…
It’s great to see old school webhosting companies survive all these years. But there are nicer tools available nowadays.
Time for a fresh start. Cleaner layout. A space for me to write and share ideas.
I started as a freelance web developer in high school. I loved creating sites directly in HTML, CSS and javascript. And PHP when I needed. No frameworks. Just a text editor, some SFTP client, and a server somewhere hosting my files. I remember when it was so easy. The hardest part was setting up the DNS. Mostly you wrote content and added a little bit of markup to style it nicely. Then over the course of time things became much, much more complex, as inevitably happens. Isn’t there some law of physics that entropy always increases?
I couldn’t be bothered to spend time working on improving my website. Most of my time and energy went to raising a family and working as a professional software developer in a fast moving industry (that continues to accelerate). Just like the cobbler’s kids with poor shoes…
But now with Claude and some AI model trained on the entirety of human written knowledge and code at my fingerpoints, I figured its time to upgrade. And I didn’t have to spend a lot of mental cycles on it.
I had Claude do all the heavy lifting to help me decide on the right framework for blogging. That would have taken me the better part of the weekend to read a bunch of articles online, read the docs for a handful of the tools and frameworks, etc. But we got it sorted in like 20 minutes.
Together we settled on the following tech stack:
- Sublime Text editor to write directly in Markdown without any distractions (or AI agents)
- Hugo
- Git and Github for hosting
- Netlify hosting
I kept DNS at GoDaddy, but pointed the nameservers at Netlify.
Netlify is integrated with Github and automatically triggers on push to master branch. It deploys my changes live in ~10 seconds. It’s amazingly fast and simple.
I used to say at work “I remember the good old days of just SFTPing some files to a server” in the midst of some complex code deployment issues. But I have to say this workflow is an even better experience.
I can run hugo server locally with a super fast live reload experience. I can preview the Markdown directly in the editor or see the site live in my browser.
Honestly, the hardest part was not getting tempted by Wordpress, Medium, Substack, Ghost and all the many other blogging options available.
Keep it simple, silly (KISS 😘).