Maintaing and updating this website has become a hobby of mine, and I’m always making changes to the way I manage it. This page is (hopefully) up-to-date documentation on the current process, both for myself and for anyone else who might be interested.

Source Code

The source code for this website lives in a git repository that you can find here on GitHub.

Editing Layouts and Content

I use Hugo, a static website generator, to turn some HTML layouts and some Markdown into a bunch of HTML that I can serve as this website.

Builds and Deploys

I host these static files on Netlify. Each time I push a new commit to the master branch in GitHub, Netlify sees that and kicks off a new build, which compiles a few lambda functions and builds the site with Hugo.

If the build fails, I get an email with a link to some logs that I can dig through to help me diagnose the failure. If the build succeeds, an updated version of the site is published!

Analytics

I don’t use any client-side analytics/tracking code. I’ve tried out a bunch of options for that, and found that they all gave me way more info than I needed and subjected visitors to my website to unreasonable amounts of third-party code.

For a while I stopped tracking viewership at all, but it is nice to have a sense of how many people are reading my posts and which ones are getting the most attention, so I recently started using Netlify Analytics, which is fully server-side and doesn’t collect unnecessary information from visitors.