TL;DR

• Caught inspiration to give this a try after reading some documentation from blogdown,
• A fair amount of trial and error using Hugo, and,
• Plenty of frustration (aka debugging).

The inspiration for this site

The truth is the motivation of building this website was my personal justification as an alternative study method. The idea was that I would write Rmarkdown posts about actuarial science (within the general insurance domain) featuring modelling results on theoretical concepts required to be learnt as part of the Institute’s exam syllabus.

As part of this I had been reading about blogdown which seemed promising and is very well documented. Unfortunately given the complex infrastructure behind the blogdown package (or perhaps that’s my excuse for just being dumb), I couldn’t get this to work in my preferred text editor, Visual Studio Code and having the output consistent with the theme I’m using (the Academic theme).¹

Perhaps an additional motiviation was that I enjoy learning new things and this seemed like a good challenge. This website was created in 2020. Around the same time I started to mess around with Blender - see this post for more details.

I had previously only tried to build a website a couple of times before:

1. Dabbling with Dreamweaver as a kid and not getting very far,
2. Building a lottery based website, Warwick Accumulator Draw “WAD” as a university module, which was a lot of fun but a lot of work too. This was built back in early 2011 on Microsoft’s .NET framework.

I also want to take this opportunity to pass on some career advice. This advice actually comes from my first boss Mike Froom who offered me a graduate trainee position at KPMG Birmingham (which was a great graduate job and would highly recommend). I must quickly add a disclaimer that the quote is paraphrased:

“You should always challenge yourself by trying something new every six months.”

Given the above, it felt like a reasonable challenge to get up and running with a modern day website. So how was this website built and how can you build your own website, for free, hosted on GitHub?

How this site was built

So how specifically was this website built? The truth is that it took a fair amount of trial and error and reading plenty of documentation. I am certainly no software developer so I hope this can give anyone the confidence that they can also build their own 100% free² website.

Here are the tools I’ve used to build this website:

1. Git - download and install Git³ for free,
2. Hugo - pick your own operating system’s binary release for free,
3. GitHub - set up your own GitHub account for free,
4. Academic Theme - fork the Academic Theme for free,
5. Visual Studio Code - download and install Microsoft’s text editor for free,

The specific deployment to host on GitHub was based on documentation from Academic.

Over time my specific setup has changed:

• I use Windows OS but use a bash terminal within VS Code.
• Wrote a shell script to automate deployment which works by:
  • Calling Hugo with no arguments, simply hugo,
  • Copies the Hugo generated public folder (representing the entire static website) into a separate repo,
  • Change directory to the other repo and commit the git changes locally,
  • Push these to the remote (GitHub repo),
  • Change back to the Hugo repo and delete the public folder.
• Changes to layout and theming is performed at the root directory, not within the theme folder

URL registration

Unfortunately garbiak.com was taken so I opted to register alexgarbiak.com as my custom URL. I am using Google Domains as the registrar of the domain. To link up the hosted content (on GitHub) with the URL I added a CNAME. Pretty straightforward with an annual fee payable of £10, seems reasonable. Some benefits of Google’s service:

• Access to Google’s DNS servers (fast and reliable you’d hope),
• Privacy (WHOIS), and
• 100 alias email addresses