As should be apparent, this site is completely static, generated by Hugo from Markdown files. I did spend some time
working on the Skeletal theme. I was held up by the highlight shortcode but found the problem soon enough. First,
the code I was testing was PHP. highlight uses pygments to generate markup. To work on PHP, it needed the <?php
opening tag to get triggered. Second, plain text colours were masked by Skeletal’s styling; this was fixed in the CSS.
The theme is a work in progress, being tuned as I migrate content from my previous site. I added an img shortcode to
the theme for image content even as I worked on this post!
Moving on to more interesting things, like hosting - being a bunch of pure HTML, this site would work happily from any hosting in the world. I first considered going the whole hog - spinning up a droplet on Digital Ocean and putting CloudFlare CDN in front of it. This was particularly appealing because CloudFlare now provides TLS from CloudFlare to the originating server. In a couple of clicks, we get both CDN and TLS. However, I would still need to maintain the server; even if I had escaped from the back-ends of dynamic blogging platforms.
The next option was using services like Amazon S3, Github Pages, Netlify or Firebase Hosting. I decided on Firebase
Hosting. I don’t think hosting can get any simpler than firebase deploy. The free tier gives TLS too. I did take a
long hard look at Netlify. Netlify helpfully provides a free (marketing) tool “to help you check any site’s
performance and security vulnerabilities”. This is the result.
Netlify Site Check against Firebase Hosting
Well, the blog currently has only a “Hello World” post. I would likely return to this test once I migrate my decommissioned blog completely to Hugo. The plan is to keep it alive on a subdomain. Sins of my youth, sort of.
So there you have it - built with Hugo, Skeleton and deployed on Firebase Hosting. And with lots of coffee.