It’s been a very very long time since I’ve posted anything publicly. Blogging has drastically changed since the early days. As most of you, I consume a lot of material and resources on the internet. For a while I’ve wanted to contribute back…I’m constantly learning new things and some of them are really useful. So, this is my way to hopefully help others.

With that, my inaugural post will be on how I set up this blog. Later, I plan on mostly writing about building microservices with Python and overall architecture patterns for microservices.

I knew that I definitely wanted something static, meaning I didn’t want to stand up my own virtual server nor did I want to sign up with any of the hosted solutions for Wordpress, Blogger, etc. I tried out Jekyll a long time ago which looked neat and had tight integration with Github Pages. At some point I came across Hugo and played around with it. It’s quite slick and apparently has been gaining more and more users. I went with Hugo since it’s pretty darn fast, easy-ish to set up and it’s written in Go (I usually hate dealing with Ruby gems and dependencies).

Here’s the TL;DR of what I did to go from zero to blogging (this is from memory so it may not be 100% correct):

$ brew install hugo
$ mkdir bz-blog && cd bz-blog
$ hugo new site brianz

To find a theme I liked went to the Hugo themes site and picked greyshade. Hugo themes are really easy to use:

$ cd brianz/themes
$ git clone https://github.com/cxfksword/greyshade.git

I don’t especially like the .toml syntax which is what you get by default for the config file. I change config.toml into config.yaml. The main thing is that I don’t like needed to add quotes around everything in the toml files. With yaml, I can just write stuff like this>

baseurl: http://brianz.bz/
languageCode: en-us
title: Brian Z
theme: greyshade

I wanted syntax highlighting, so installed pygments inside a virtual environment. Also, there are different “themes” for syntax highlighting which can be looked up directly from pygments:

$ mkvirtualenv hugo
$ pip install pygments
$ python

>>> from pygments.styles import get_all_styles
>>> list(get_all_styles())

I ended up using the lovelace theme by setting pygmentsstyle: lovelace in config.yaml

Note:, there is a small issue with the greyshade theme in that Hugo will throw an error when creating a new post. To fix this simply create a file at archetypes/default.md with the following contents (or customize as you see fit):

+++

draft=true
tags = []

+++

With that, I can now create new posts and see it in real-time using hugo server --buildDrafts.

Now that things are working, I’ll talk about publishing things in my next post.