A Few Words First:

For quite some time now, I’ve wanted to create a “blog” section on my website. Not really to run a “blog” in the traditional sense, nor to share my opinion on absolutely everything, but rather to explain, document, and share what I learn throughout my projects.

For years, whenever I spent hours configuring, wiring, or programming something, I would eventually write a small Markdown guide so I wouldn’t have to figure everything out again a few months later. Those guides would usually end up tucked away somewhere in my GitHub Gists, where they would then remain quietly forgotten.

That’s a shame, because some of those notes can actually be useful to other people. So rather than letting them disappear into oblivion, I decided to bring them all together here.

This website is therefore primarily intended as a place for documentation, guides, and hands-on experiences involving the digital and technological tools I use, discover, or learn to master.

Building the Project:

I decided not to change my usual approach: work with what I have to keep everything simple and intuitive to use, but above all, to make sure hosting doesn’t cost me a penny!

Paying for a server seems completely unnecessary and particularly expensive to me, especially when all I want to do is run a website for publishing a few documents from time to time. On top of that, I absolutely hate advertising, so there was never any question of covering the project’s costs by filling it with ads.

That’s why, just like my main website, I chose to build this as a traditional “static” website. This approach allows me to keep hosting simple while taking advantage of completely free hosting through GitHub Pages.

However, building a static website entirely from scratch can quickly become cumbersome as the project grows.

That’s where static site generators come in. In my case, I chose to use Hugo.

Why Hugo, and What Exactly Is It?

Hugo is a static site generator. In practical terms, it allows you to build a website from templates, content, and data, and then automatically generate the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that will ultimately be served to visitors.

This approach makes developing static websites considerably easier and faster. When a website is built entirely by hand, you quickly end up dealing with a lot of repetition and copy-pasting just to reproduce the same elements across different pages. Hugo makes it possible to factor all of this out and automatically generate pages from shared templates.

I chose Hugo for several reasons:

• It’s open source: this is an ecosystem I particularly appreciate, and one I naturally prefer to support and trust.

• It’s extremely fast: written in Go, Hugo generates website pages at an impressive speed. Even for relatively large projects, the build process generally takes only a few moments.

• It’s highly flexible and feature-rich: Hugo offers a wide range of themes, modules, and tools that can be used to extend its capabilities. It also benefits from an active community and a well-established reputation built up over many years.

The Theme I Chose — and Why?

The theme I’m using wasn’t created by me. It was very generously made available by Atsushi Nagase.

You can find it here: https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-primer-blog/.

I’ve simply made a few modifications to better adapt it to my needs and personal identity.

Why Does This Theme Look Like GitHub?

Quite simply, because I love GitHub!

I’ve been using the platform for many years, and it has become an integral part of my work.

So naturally, when I discovered this theme, its strong GitHub-inspired design immediately caught my attention. It was clean, understated, professional, and still pleasant to browse. Most importantly, it already met pretty much all of my requirements without needing any major changes.

In short, why look any further when you’ve already found something you like?

The Project’s Source Code:

As with most of my personal projects, the entire source code is available as open source.

The repository obviously doesn’t contain anything particularly exciting, but it does provide the complete Hugo configuration along with the various modifications I’ve made to the theme. If you’re interested, the entire project is available on my GitHub: https://github.com/Nde-Code/blog.

Beyond simply sharing the code, I’d like to keep this project open and, who knows, perhaps make it a collaborative one.

Everyone is therefore welcome to browse the code, suggest improvements, report issues, or even contribute directly to the project.

The idea is simple: since this project is all about sharing, it only makes sense for its development to be shared as well.

Postscript:

I’m certainly not going to pretend that my spelling is flawless. I therefore regularly use various tools to proofread and correct my writing, including, of course, AI.

Even so, these tools aren’t infallible, so it’s entirely possible that a typo or mistake may occasionally slip through into an article. If you spot one, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

I mainly use Scribens and Reverso to help me with this.

Opening a pull request or an issue on the GitHub repository is by far the best way to report a correction to me.