Welcome to the meta post about this very website you’re reading! I recently built and deployed my personal site – Danniverse! I wanted to share the process and why I chose this particular tech stack.

Why Hugo?

When deciding on a static site generator, I had a few requirements:

• Fast builds - I didn’t want to wait around for my site to compile
• Simple content management - Writing in Markdown is my preference
• Easy theming - I wanted something that looked good out of the box and easy to be customized
• Active community - Good documentation and theme support

Hugo checked all these boxes. Plus, it’s written in Go, which means it’s blazingly fast (I don’t know much about Go. Maybe I should add it into my bucket list?).

Setting Up Hugo

The initial setup was straightforward: Quick start

I really like the blogging platform – ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear for its clean and minimal style. I choose self-hosting at the cost of leaving Bear’s platform for customizing my site as I want. I went with hugo-bearneo by Rokcso because it’s Bear blog based but more extensible and feature-rich. On top of that, I added the pinky bd-bear-theme by binarydigitlol because it feels like my vibe too :)

Deploying with Cloudflare Pages

For hosting, I chose Cloudflare Pages over other options like Netlify or GitHub Pages because:

• Cloudflare is on my list of dream companies!🫢
• Free and generous limits - More than enough for a personal blog
• Global CDN - Fast loading times everywhere
• Automatic deployments - Push to GitHub and it deploys automatically
• Built-in analytics - No need for external tracking
• Custom domain support - Easy DNS management. I bought danniverse.com on Cloudflare as well.

The deployment process is incredibly simple:

1. Push my Hugo site code to a GitHub repo
2. Connect the repo to Cloudflare Pages
3. Configure the build command (hugo) and output directory (public). The public/ folder should be gitignored since it’s generated. For proper linking and deployment, setting a specific Hugo version by adding it as an env var is highly recommended.

   

4. Cloudflare automatically builds and deploys on every push

Some take-aways

A few things I picked up along the way:

• Hugo’s directory structure is logical once you understand the content hierarchy
• Custom layouts can override theme defaults without modifying the theme itself
• Cloudflare Pages is seriously fast - deployments take less than a minute