Disclaimer: This guide is mostly about me keeping a trace of the process I followed to create this blog. I really wanted to use GitHub for the hosting and that leads to a lot of additional complexity that you should avoid if you are not used to writing code.

I used GitHub pages to host my blog, they are free but only support static websites and, by default, force you to use their domain. Both restrictions are fine by me since I wanted a static website and am okay with having a domain that makes it clear that writing code is a part of my life.

I really wanted to write my blog in Markdown as I find it to be the proper level of abstraction to separate formatting from content.

GitHub pages recommends using Jekyll to have a Markdown-based blog. However, I found their approach too restrictive for my needs: Jekyll felt heavily optimized for a normal blog organization (a series of posts in chronological order) while I wanted my content to be organized in a deep tree-like folder hierarchy.

I thus decided to use Hugo, following this excellent tutorial.

Hugo supports a large number of themes and lets you customize things fairly easily. So far I have barely scratched the surface.

I wrote some Javascript and CSS (loosely inspired by this approach) to automatically convert my footnotes into side notes.

I also added an unlisted field, using this approach, to be able to link to pages that would not appear in the index by default (this can be done by setting them to draft but feels semantically wrong).

I first drew from previous texts I wrote for friends and message boards as well as personal texts I kept in folders (this explains why some dates are anterior to the creation of the blog).

As I am not aiming for a chronological blog, I do not hesitate to come back to previous texts and edit them heavily to improve them. I aim to keep doing this, coming back to texts from time to time when I see ways to improve them.

I have some essays and themes in mind for the new content. I suspect that a key will be to make a note whenever a possible topic crosses my mind.