gphugo

Development Blog

What you are looking at is, first and foremost, a development blog. More than that, it's a personal motivator. I struggle to maintain my productivity when a project slows down, so I hope that by combining the process of development with content creation I am able to keep this project in my sights when shiny new projects arrive.

Free, Self-Deploying Website

Now, the cool part. This codebase, beyond operating my personal blog, can be cloned into a new repository in Github giving you the same site, ready to start developing to suit your needs, in under 5 minutes. There is work to do after that, if you want to make sure it's uniquely yours, but that's the fun part of open source, we are all developers!

Own Your Site Now

Here's how:

1. Sign up for a github account

Click on this link to Sign up for Github
If you need more help you can check Github's Help Page

2. Fork the project
   (make a copy that you can work on)

Go to the gphugo Github page
In the upper right hand corner of the github page is a button that you push to fork the project
What this means technically may be a little complex if you're just getting started, but the short version is: when you are done following Github's process to fork the repository, you will have an exact copy of the code that builds the blog, belonging to you, and hosted for free by Github

3. Enable workflows and Github Pages

Workflows rely on the Github Actions api, which can be enabled on forked repositories by clicking on Actions at the top navbar of the repository
Github pages can be enabled by clicking on Settings in the same navbar and scrolling down until you see the subsection labeled Github Pages
You will want to select the gh-pages branch and root folder

4. If you would like to enable Google Anaytics

Create a Github Secret called HUGO_GOOGLEANALYTICS and set your Google Tracking ID as the content
You will also need to replace my google verification file with yours so Google can verify you own your site

That should have you ready to edit the basic details and start blogging with Forestry.io

additional steps to document
add secrets.cname to build gh-pages with cname record
add secrets.secret_firebase_token to deploy to firebase (will require firebase initialization for correct repository)