I tend to be the type of person who consumes content rather than creating it. But recently, I’ve gotten inspired to start making my own content in a dedicated space.

Most of these posts are going to take the form of tutorials, walking you through something. I figured there’s no better place to start than here.

So you want to start a blog#

There’s a lot of different options to get you started. You’ve got the big ones: Wordpress, WIX, Blogger, Medium, etc. As someone who’s never worked on any of those platforms, I obviously have the authority to make sweeping generalizations about them.

Personally, they all just felt too blasé. I wanted something that that felt more personal. After next to no research, I arbitrarily decided on Hugo. And here we are.

Starting the Site#

Hugo makes it incredibly easy to get your site up and running. On their getting started page, they go over how to make your first post.

Truthfully, all of the customization they offer can be a little overwhelming, so it’s best to start off simple. Just choose a theme, and dive right in!

The Host of Christmas Past#

Once you come up with some content for your site, you’re going to need some place to host it. Again, the Hugo docs come in handy. One that stuck out to me immediately was Render, mainly because

Static sites are completely free on Render…

Hey, that’s pretty neat! That means if all your doing is hosting a simple blog (like this), you don’t have to worry about any additional costs.

Render also offers

• Automatic site updates when pushes are made to a branch
• Site previews on GitHub pull requests
• Custom domain support

These are all pluses in my book!

If you put all of this together, you’re left with… well… this! A site hosted completely for free and a snazzy looking blog.