Skanda's Blog

About

Hi!

Nothing much to say about me really, just me trying to start maintaining a blog.

The blog is hosted as a sub domain - blog.saiskanda.in, the ‘main’ site is still www.saiskanda.in that is currently pointing to a linktree of links I update every now and then.

If I get the hang of this, I might host a site for the main page as well, maybe not.. lets see.

How the site was built

If you are wondering this site is built using a static site generator called Hugo. I first found out about Hugo from the website maintained by Andrew Marsh. He has a wonderful online sun path app that can show you for any location on earth, how the sun will move across the sky. Do check it out! Will write a blog post about the apparent migration of the sun one day!

Steps in brief below:

Please read further online or watch tutorials on YouTube. Contact me if you have any specific questions and I will try to answer them.

Hugo quick start guide - Here

  1. Install Hugo on your device from here
  2. Navigate to a folder where you want to store your site files and run hugo new site your-site-name
  3. Install a theme as a submodule from here
    1. This generally involves going to the GitHub page and copying the clone link
    2. Add the theme as a git submodule - Instructions
    3. Ensure .gitmodules file is created in the root
  4. Edit the hugo.toml configuration file to specify theme and add any other config settings as per your theme or Hugo specific config
  5. Create a new post using hugo new posts/your-post-name.md
  6. Update the markdown file with your content and save
  7. Run hugo server - you should now be able to access the site on localhost
  8. initialize your root folder as a git repo and push to GitHub
  9. Connect your Netlify/Vercel account to this repo and configure the build and deploy process
  10. Connect your Netlify/Vercel domain to your personal domain

p.s. looking back now from 2024-10-05, I am quite happy that I had this figured out before I started using LLMs! I think they were around but I was using good old Google searches to figure out stuff. Hugo is definitely one of the easier things to setup and get it up and running, because so much of it is abstracted away by core hugo and free theme creators. Though I stupid and deleted the fork of the paper theme, I am surprised I figured out how to edit the theme to make it show custom stuff in the template, I think I had added last modified timestamp and a few things.