Starting a Blog

calendar Mar 6, 2022 · 2 min read · blogging  ·
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I have always meant to start a blog but never really got round to it. Recently I was inspired to try and get things going after reading Thomas Thornton's blog site. He has lots of great content going back over a number of years in subject areas that interest me.

As I have used GitHub for a while I was aware of GitHub Pages and even started setting it up a few years back with a Hello WorldJekyll starter (a previous failed attempt at starting to blog). This time I wanted to start exploring other static site generators and after some very high-level research I decided on Hugo.

I did some further research on GitHub and Hugo and finally came across this excellent YouTube video by Maksym Postument and accompanying blog post. This content gave me pretty much the basis of what I was looking to achieve:

  • Use Hugo static site generator to turn my Markdown blog posts into content that I could host on GitHub Pages.
  • Include the use of GitHub Actions to treat the blog posting process like a normal CI/CD style operation, including some linting of my content.
  • Take advantage of Dependabot to create PRs for me to keep the GitHub Actions that I am using up to date.

After adopting the above I just really needed to pick a Hugo Blog Theme. After reviewing most of the themes I settled on Anatole for the following reasons:

  • It is actively maintained with a number of contributors.
  • Well documented with lots of features.
  • An example site content with good blog post examples.
  • Had 433 GitHub stars at the time of writing

So what you are reading now is the starting point of my initial research and implementation. I would like to add a few more features like options for comments and site statistics but for now it is a start and certainly further than I have previously managed to get. Hopefully this won't be the only blog post after me turning over this new leaf.

Update August 2022 - I decided to switch from Anatole to Clarity Hugo Theme. This was mainly down to how the default code blocks and tables were rendered.