Knowing very little about creating websites, my first choice was to try to setup a site on Wordpress. My experience was not so smooth. It involved setting up databases and installing large binaries just to get a simple site going. When I spoke to a friend about this, he introduced me to static websites, which seem to work great for me. Between Jekyll and Hugo, I felt that Hugo themes were better and has really good emacs integration and hence will be easy to integrate into my existing workflow. Now that I’ve got the site up and running, here’s the simplest way to go about it.
Setting up hugo site locally was seamless. Got it working on both Linux and macOS without hassles. The ready-solution provided by the developers is to host the entire folder on Github and use github-actions to compile the site on-the-fly. This has 2 problems, IMO. The first one being that you’re reliant on Github compilation mechanisms (which are free for now, but there is no guarantee that it will be forever). The second problem is the issue of privacy. Ideally you would want to secure the source code and make public only the barebones contents of the website. So there had to be an alternate solution.
Compiling locally and pushing compiled website
Since you anyway compile locally to check if the website looks fine, it didn’t make sense to make the Github system compile again. The solution was simply to create a repository which contains only the compiled code and it works! The only additional change is to explicitly change the settings on the github repo to tell that the root directory has a website which needs to be deployed!
Testing modification
Coments were made previously. Now do the comments stay as is if more content is added?