This site took a little while to get up and running, with a few tricks needed here and there, but now that it’s all setup, the editing workflow is surprisingly smooth.

First things first, this site is hosted using Hugo, a quick and easy static site generator. I played around with alternatives like Jekyll, Hexo, and even the haskell-based Hakyll, before settling on Hugo almost entirely because of the incredibly fast build times. This site is based on the ultramin theme for Hugo, which is a minimal theme that I designed.

For domain registration, I use Google Domains which is similarly easy to use, and cheap as well. The site itself is hosted on github pages at the address zmaas.github.io. Then, cloudflare is used to forward the domain to the abstractlambda.com address, in addition to providing support for things like HSTS and site caching. Even though static sites like this are fast, they can be even faster using Cloudflare.

Finally, email addresses for this domain are setup using mailgun.com, which works fine for my use cases even with the 10,000 email per month free limit. With all that considered, the only cost for this site is domain registration, which Google Domains prices at $12 a year for .com domains.

For actually writing articles I use a heavily customized Emacs, configured with prodigy.el to run Hugo’s serve command whenever I am actively editing an article. In addition, I keep all posts in a single org-mode file and use ox-hugo to export posts when they’re ready to be published. When I want to update the actual site, I just commit the changes and push them to github. Nice and easy.