This blog is built with Hugo — an open-source static site generator. Static websites require no server side processing, which makes them easier to host and opens up new hosting possibilities.

There are many options out there, but I deploy my website to AWS S3, using CloudFront to distribute it globally (aka. make it fast).

Here is the why and the how.

I like the concept of blog post series — a large topic or project, broken up in smaller pieces. Easier to write, easier to read.

Here is how I implemented a series taxonomy in Hugo 👇

I recently (finally) finished moving all articles from my old wiki — to this blog. Once that was done I needed to forward all URLs to their new location.

My site is hosted with AWS CloudFront, so I made a simple redirect function and deployed it to AWS Lambda@Edge.

I’m not a big fan of embedding YouTube videos, it adds a lot of weight to the page and I have limited control over it. It pulls in all kinds of styles, scripts and fonts from multiple domains. YouTube has a nocookie embed option, which is suppose to be privacy-friendly, but who knows.

So if not YouTube — what then? Vimeo is one option, it costs a few coffees per month. But it has some of the same problems as YouTube, as it also uses an iframe.

So I tried some other solutions.

I recently added a CSS background color to my cover images, using the dominant color from the cover image itself. It is a nice effect, and gives the appearance of faster load time — should the image take some time to complete.

For my transparent cover images; I made the background very opaque, providing a soft touch of color. I think it looks nice 🙂

Here is how I did it. 👇