This has not been easy.
But, it’s been pretty rewarding.
I have almost no experience designing websites, unless you count messing around with MySpace HTML as website design. Speaking of, how do I add my profile song?
But I had heard that building a Hugo website was pretty easy. And their themes are pretty sharp. It’s been nice going from nothing to an actual site built out.
One thing I learned quickly: do not rely on AI to setup a basic site to launch from. If at any point early on, it’s telling you to edit any of the html files, STOP. Undo what it’s done, and instead follow the Hugo/theme’s website documentation.
I made the mistake of googling and asking AI for assistance building this out. Almost every step of the way they were wrong, and it turns out if you just read the documentation on the Hugo/Blowfish websites you’ll have a good idea how to build it out. Who woulda thunk?
From what I kind of gathered, AI pulls a lot of it’s recommendations from old builds. So I found it telling me to do things in the HTML files that the config files already take care of. So it would break the website quite often.
My goal.
Let’s start with why I am building this website. Originally, months ago, I needed a portfolio site for my graphic design portfolio. And rather quickly. I went about it by using Adobe Portfolio which comes free if you subscribe to any of their plans. So it comes with a cost.
I will say, Adobe Potfolio has been fine. It’s really easy to use, and satisfies 90% of what I wanted the site to accomplish.
But the website was missing one thing: a blog page.
I could accomplish this by just creating a page and then just writing, but each “post” wouldn’t have a page. It would just be one long text block. A little too janky.
Why a blog anyways?
I don’t know, why not? Why are you asking? Are you a cop? I thought it would be a nice way to do writeups for projects I’m working on.
I have a ton of hobbies, and I cycle through them throughout the year.
graph LR; A[hobby hyper fixation]-->B[boredom]; B-->C[repeat with the next hobby]
The cycle continues, all year long. But I’ve found myself revisitng projects and not remembering where I left off, or even what the hell I was trying to accomplish in the first place. So, frustratingly, there is a lot of relearning.
Can’t wait to relearn website design!
About that portfolio tho
Once I got my basic site up and running, and created a blog page + some sample blogs, I could see how I can adapt this to my portfolio. It’s essentially doing the same thing as my Adobe Portfolio site. I think I can do this.