Hello World!

Or more appropriately:

First Sign of Life
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public class HelloWorld {

  public static void main( String[] args ) {
    System.out.println( "Hello World!" );
  }
}

My website www.luossfi.org finally got published. Yay!

For quite some time I was thinking about what would be the best way for me to create and maintain a website. I wanted a blog, but also some way to present and document my open source projects (well, actually only one for now). However doing it the hard way by writing HTML markup directly seemed to be a bit too low level and using a full blown CMS like WordPress also did just not feel right for this task.

So I was wondering whether there was some (already existing) technology in between the mentioned extremes and happily I discovered there actually is. This technology was static website generators from which I decided to give Hugo (gohugo.io) a try. This was mainly because it was available in Arch Linux’s repositories and therefore easy to install.

After playing around a bit with Hugo it just felt right. It does not limit my freedom regarding the results too much and the best thing, it can just work on plain HTML and CSS. No PHP, JavaScript and such needed! It also supports using Asciidoctor (asciidoctor.org) which I really love for writing text, this was a revelation to me, as Markdown always felt a bit too basic and partly counter intuitive.

Next topic coming up was of course the theme for my website. First, I wanted to use something from Hugo’s themes. It however turned out that none of the available themes would both meet my requirements and my personal taste. Only solution (as so often in a software developer’s life) was to do this myself. Unfortunately my experience with HTML and CSS was quite some time ago and, back then, stuff like HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design were not of my concern. So I bought a book regarding responsive design with HTML5 and CSS3 and read it within a few days. Then I created the theme of this website, of which I expect to improve it over time (like using SASS for example).

And now, here I am. Let’s see what the future will bring!

PS: The build steps required for this website are automated with Gradle (my favorite build system)!