My second homepage

Hey there fellow readers! A few years ago, I would never have imagined, that this site would have regular visitors. But now, there are between 600 and 1000 visitors here each month! Quite impressive! Still, I haven’t really posted any updates on here in quite a while. Mainly, because I have finished studying. There is still an Anki CSS post I’m currently working on, that will come out some time.

This time however, I want to share my second homepage. Lately, I’ve been doing more and more landscape photography (and photography in general). With most stuff I create, I always like a place to share it, and occasionally write something about it. Therefore, I set up another page, located at https://christian-j.com

Why a second page?

This was mainly due to the target audience. If you are here, you’re most likely interested in technical stuff. Things that computers do, programming, etc. The second page is aimed towards people interested in my photos or in the locations I visit.

Technical aspects

The page you are currently visiting is created using Jekyll, a static page generator. I used Jekyll, because I was already familiar with it and GitHub offers free hosting. You just need to get a domain (or you can use the yourname.github.io default). The second page is using Hugo, another static page generator. Why Hugo? I just wanted to try out something different. After all: it’s always fascinating to learn stuff. The “code” of the page is in a GitHub repository. The page uses used “Hugo Future Imperfect Slim” as theme. The page you’re currently seeing (i.e. chrisk91.me) is using a custom theme/layout entirely written by me. But updating themes is a hassle, and I wanted something that gets me started quickly.

2023-03-07: The site has been updated to use a custom theme after a few months. The theme initially used was no longer maintained.

To host the site, I had to chose something different from GitHub (GitHub only supports Jekyll, and not Hugo). I came across Netlify, that offers continuous deployment for static sites, and has a free tier for small pages. Setting up the domain was also easy, I simply had to point it to their DNS server, and records and SSL certificates are added automatically.

Adjusting the theme was easy, since it came with an extensive sample configuration. I’m looking forward to diving into it more deeply in the future. And that was it… Once I had everything set up, I simply pushed my first post, and everything went smoothly. Creating a website is really easy these days! If you are interested in how it looks, head over to christian-j.com.