Creating your personal website

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Creating your personal website

tl;dr; - This is a 5 min guide on how you can broadly go about making your own personal website. While I might not go into each aspect in detail, I’ll try and skim each of them and give pointers on where to dig deeper.

Why create your website?

I think of this as more of a personal question. For myself, I’ve created mine for a few reasons:

  • Primarily, I enjoyed the tech challenge in making one of my own instead hosting it on a managed platform like google sites etc.
  • Spread my personal brand? It’s useful to have a place to host things you like and keep folks aware of the things you are working on (I’ve definetely had a few researchers reach out to follow up on my work)

Static Site Generators

There are several static site generators in the market. The most famous of these are Jekyll, and Hugo. You can probably search around and find a lot of sites enumerating the difference between them. However, having used both, I would rate them as mostly equal. Overall Hugo is much easier to set-up and is faster, on the other hand Jekyll is slower (ruby based instead of golang) and a little bit of a headache to setup (though personally that was mostly setting up of the correct ruby version in my mac).