Here are the tools used to build this website.
Hugo is an open source tool that provides the necessary files to start a website. The community is vast and some members built open and free themes that can be used to design the website. Once you know how to read and interact with HTML and CSS, it is quite easy to adapt the base files and premade theme to your own needs.
In order to read the modify the files generated by Hugo, you need a code editor. I decided to use Visual Studio Code, as it is free and very easy to use. here’s the link to download and how to get started.
I also used this great tutorial given by Mike Dane, who guides you through the exercice of building a simple website with a simple theme. After this, you will definetly be able to start your own and tinker around with a different theme, organize your posts, menus, visual style and much more.
After building and editing my website, I needed a system to do version control, which avoids me from having many files named _v2, _v3, _final, _final2, _final_final etc… I’m sure many of you had this issue with your excel files! I needed a way to also put those files online without having to deal with renaming so that I could then find a hosting service for publishing. Github serves that purpose well as I can push my code to my repository and pull it from another computer, write content, and push it back to the main source. It is also very easy to integrate Netlify, the free hosting service that I use. See here to get started with Github.
Finally, I had to find a reliable and free website hosting service that could hold my website with no hassle. Netlify was able to satisfy those needs quite easily and I would recommend anyone starting to go with them for their hosting services. By having your repo on github, Netlify can create a bridge and host your files in a jiffy. Hugo has a nice guide on how to host on Netlify. There are also many ressources online that guide you through this process, because you might get some obscure errors when deploying, but fear not, the Hugo and Netlify community is very active and willing to help! Also chances are someone else made that mistake before and the solution is somewhere on their forums.
Your posts will be writted in markdown, which is a language used to add formatting elements to plain-text documents. It’s interesting to know that it was cocreated by Aaron Swartz. Guide to Markdown.
Simple as that! :)