Five years ago, things were sufficiently different in the social media world that I could still view, much less use, Twitter without wanting to bleach my brain thereafter. And, thus, five years ago today, I tweeted that I had just created something for the web-browsing public’s perusal.
In fact, you’re viewing that thing now.
It’s still propagating (as is the SSL cert to make your browser happy with it), but my new personal site will be up shortly: http://brycewray.com. Be kind. It’s young.1
9:13 PM • September 23, 2018 (UTC)
The site’s original purpose was the eventual marketing of a novel on which I’d been working for about a year at that point, but I never managed to finish that novel. Still, this is the site’s 325th post, so I obviously found other topics on which to write.
Most of those topics have been tech-oriented in general, and quite a few have dealt more specifically with website development — even more specifically, website development through the use of static site generators (SSGs). That’s because one SSG or another has built this site for every day of these five years, and likely will continue to do so as long as the site exists.
The decision to build the site with an SSG rather than, say, WordPress was based on weeks beforehand of research and trial-and-error tinkering. I’d never heard of SSGs before then, but what I learned sold me on them. I remain so sold to this day.
The specific SSG I chose for building and maintaining the site was Hugo. As I’ve chronicled here numerous times, I have also used several other SSGs over the years but, on the whole, I’ve repeatedly brought the site back to Hugo. Indeed, I’ve grown pretty comfortable with keeping it on Hugo, where it’s now been for quite a few months.
Thanks for stopping by to visit this ongoing labor of love, whether this is your first time here or you’re coming back after one or more previous visits. (And I really appreciate it if you’ve followed the site.) Or, to put it another way: thanks for being one of the many reasons I’ve kept this going for five years now.
I don’t remember anymore, but now assume I identified it as http rather than https precisely because I was waiting on that SSL certificate to go through the process. And it would be a few years later before I’d decide to include the www subdomain as a standard part of the website URL. ↩︎
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