This is my personal site and blog. I write about cybersecurity, CTFs, programming, and whatever else I feel like. The design is very human.

Stack

  • Hugo - static site generator. Go-based, fast, with no runtime dependencies. Originally tried to roll my own but uh, that was a bad idea.
  • Markdown + TOML - all content is plain markdown with TOML front matter. I think needing a database for your blog that gets 10 readers a month is way overkill.
  • Custom CSS - hand-rolled dark theme. IBM Plex Mono is my favorite font, so I’m locally hosting it for my code blocks to avoid additional fetching.
  • Umami - self-hosted analytics. No cookies or tracking. I like Umami.
  • Hetzner VPS - I’ve had a Hetzner VPS (or many) for a few years now. I migrated over there a long time ago and never looked back. The value is crazy, and Hetzner is a great organization.

Why Hugo

I’ve tried a few different static site generators, and even tried to make my own, and wasn’t a super big fan of any of them. Hugo has been good though. It’s a single binary with no dependencies, and it’s been the same single binary for years. The templating is occasionally frustrating, but the tradeoff is worth it in my opinion. My hot take is that if your personal website or blog needs a runtime like Node or a framework like Vue just to function, you are making WAY too much work for yourself. Its also nice for your site to just load instantly on any device that visits it.

Uh, why is it not open source? What are you hiding???

I might upload the source at some point, but honestly its literally just a standard Hugo blog with some custom CSS. Its not some crazy revolutionary website that redefines what the web is. It was like 2 weekends of work.