Blog
This website!
Core
Framework
This site is built with Hugo using the Minimo theme. I looked at Jekyll and Gatsby too but ultimately went with Hugo as it looked like the best balance of simplicity and flexibility. Plus it’s built on Golang, so it’s extremely fast.
Hosting
This site is hosted on Netlify. I cannot recommend them enough. They offer free hosting for basic websites like mine, and offer automatic deployments from a github repo.
All images are hosted on Cloudinary. You get tons of storage and bandwidth for free, without even having to put in a credit card! Their API is also extremely flexible, allowing you to add simple parameters to the url to reduce image file sizes on demand.
Domain
I bought the domain on Google Domains. I liked that they had simple pricing, with no upsells.
Mailing List
Get sign ups
Netlify Form (only 100/month for free) -> Zapier -> Google Sheet
Notify on new post
I manually add people from the Google Sheet to my Google Contacts and add a label, then send a group email to the label.
Allow you to unsubscribe
Anyone receiving the emails will need to respond to me and I’ll remove them from the list.
Analytics
I’m currently deciding between a few options to implement analytics:
- Google Analytics
- Netlify Analytics
- Roll my own
Google Analytics
The simplest option, and free. However, ad blockers can lead to GA not capturing all sessions and I feel a bit bad about willingly sharing all my visitor’s data with Google.
Netlify Analytics
This seems like a great option, as it uses server side logs to track analytics, so it’s not subject to issues caused by ad blockers. Unfortunately, it’s $9 per month, which is a bit steep for me at the moment.
- https://www.raymondcamden.com/2019/07/12/netlify-analytics-an-initial-look
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405040
Roll my own
I did see one blog post about rolling your own analytics using js, AWS Lambda, and Google Sheets, so I may explore that a bit more.