A new website

August 17, 2026 · Technology · #hugo #emacs #org #web

I’ve owned this domain for a long time, and over the years the site has gone through a few iterations. I always spent my effort on things like impressive design, interesting animations, etc., but never on content. The site would consist of nothing more than a few links, maybe with some kind of “under construction” message. Well, I’ve finally got around to the construction.

Eventually, I expect much of the usefulness of this site will be found in utilities and projects in the subdomains. Because this is hosted on GitHub Pages, those will need to run on other servers. For now this is just the static base site. I have the domain, may as well finally use it.

I’m also a big fan of simplicity in technology, so I don’t mind a simple static site. Filling it up with interesting content is the real challenge.

Technical details

Here’s a description of the technical side of the site, for anyone interested:

The stack is Emacs -> ox-hugo -> Hugo -> Git -> GitHub Pages. If you know what those are, then you already know what’s coming.

I write the site, including these posts, with Emacs in Org mode format. When I’m done making changes, I can press an Emacs key combination and the ox-hugo package compiles the file into markdown for Hugo. The directory is a git repository, and when I commit and push my changes GitHub Actions automatically updates the page on GitHub Pages.

This makes writing new content an extremely simple process, basically just editing a plain text file. Each Org heading is its own post, subheadings become sections. Marking the heading DONE will include the post in the next export. I can commit with magit, so I never even have to leave Emacs. The Org tree of this current post looks like this:

* DONE A new website :hugo:emacs:org:web:@Technology:
  CLOSED: [2026-07-19 Sun 00:23]
  :PROPERTIES: :EXPORT_FILE_NAME: a-new-website :EXPORT_DESCRIPTION:
  What am I doing here?  :END: (content) ** Technical details
  (content) ** Blog (content)

So guess what comes next?

Blog

I generally don’t use social media, I may have accounts but I never check them. If I have anything interesting to write, I now have this blog. This will be a good place to put the things I think or learn about computers/data/AI/etc. I may be unemployed, but technology is my profession and so that’s what I will focus on. I haven’t decided how far posts may occasionally stray from technology, we’ll find out as time goes on. In any case, this is an informal personal site. It won’t be the kind of content you might find in a newsletter on any specific topic.