a free page

This is the initial post on this page, which I’m still not sure if it will be a blog, a site, a portal, a service, or something worth it. As usual, a little about how the page was created. The English-speaking people would now begin with awesome or outstanding or other such exaggerated adjectives they like. If every minimalistic static page is fantastic then the whole world is a homogeneous soup of “extraordinary” things that ends for being incredibly dull.

This page is static, meaning no processing on the server side. Files are stored on the server, but it is the client side that interprets them. The recent trend in this model comes from asset loading speed and minimal aesthetics that prefers the emphasis on well-kept typography, economical organization and balanced color. Not that there is no room for the vibrant. I have another page, made with another tool for static pages, which looks like a bubble gum.

The tools I use here are composed of Hugo, a framework for building websites, as this static page generator is self-defined, written in Go, and Cocoa EH, the ultra-minimalist theme with clean and cool typography for Hugo. I use a macbook pro early 2011 with 16 Gb of RAM. Without excessive details:

• I installed Hugo with Homebrew, one of the package managers for MacOs:

$ ruby -e "$ (curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
$ brew install hugo

I chose a theme from the [hundreds][themes] available and installed it by downloading the contents of the repository into the themes\cocoa-eh folder within the location I chose to house the page code. As I use the Git version control system, I started a git repository in the folder where I keep the page files, and then cloned the theme as a submodule:

$ cd folder
$ git init
$ git submodule add https://github.com/fuegowolf/cocoa-eh-hugo-theme.git themes / cocoa-eh

I added this line to the config.toml file:

$ echo 'theme = cocoa-eh' >> config.toml

This file stores configuration parameters in toml format. The theme comes with an example that can be customized:

baseurl = "https://example.com/"
theme = "cocoa-eh"
builddrafts = true
canonifyurls = true
contentdir = "content"
languageCode = "en-US"
layoutdir = "layouts"
publishdir = "public"
author = "Alexis Tacnet"
title = "Cocoa Enhanced"
disqusshortname = ""
pluralizelisttitles = false

[permalinks]
blog = "blog/:slug/"

[params]
dateform = "Jan 2, 2006"
dateformfull = "Mon Jan 2 2006 15:04:05 MST"
description = "Example blog"
copyright = "Copyright © 2015 Nishanth Shanmugham"
# copyrightUrl = "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
logofile = "img/logo.png"
faviconfile = "img/logo.png"
highlightjs = true
progressively = true
share = true
latestpostcount = 5
github = "example"
email = "you@example.com"
linkedin = "john-example-aa80ue8è"
twitter = "example"
facebook = "facebook_id"
social_banner = "img/banner.png"
usesmallsummarycard = true
posts_navigation = true
# thisHost = "comments.domain.tld: 1234"
# githubRepo = "githubUsername/repositoryName"
small_banner_logo = false

[params.colors]
identifier = "# 527fc1f"
identifier_dark = "# 1a3152"
trivial = "# 6a7a8b"
foreground = "# 181d2a"
background = "# f9f9f9"
background_dark = "# 282a36"
code = "# 87a5d2"
type = "# 97d28b"
special = "# ffcb8d"
value = "# 96c2d7"
statement = "# ff8e91"

After installing Hugo and downloading the theme, just run the code:

$ hugo
$ hugo server

After starting the server, I pointed the browser to http://localhost:1313 and the page could be viewed.

However, I stiil had to implement the page in some web server. Specifically, I wanted to use Bitbucket, and the Atlassian code storage portal serves static content at <user> .bitbucket.io addresses. To do this, I created a repository in my Bitbucket account, naming it according to the above convention (the page name). Then I synchronized the source with the master branch of the page’s local repository:

$ git remote add origin https://<user>@bitbucket.org/<user>/<user>.bitbucket.io.git
$ git push -u origin master

As just the contents of the public folder should be served, I created a new branch of the repository by filtering the folder in question:

$ git subtree split --branch deploy --prefix public /
$ git checkout deploy
$ git push -u origin deploy

This way, the new branch deploy had already been synchronized with the cloud. The last detail was to configure the repository in Bitbucket so that the main branch would be deploy and not master. Then I navigated to https://<user>.bitbucket.io and checked the final result.