Roughly a year ago I announcedsciolism 2019. Yesterday I finally shipped the initial release of the theme. It look quite a long time to do the final tweaks and make a decision on when to ship the theme — maybe I should write about this process later because it was a very interesting journey.
sciolism 2019 is a light-weighted and minimalistic theme for the static site generator Hugo. The theme was designed for blogs. In fact this is the very theme that you are looking at right now. Further information is available in the theme’s Readme file. The theme is currently available via GitHub but I submitted the theme to the official Hugo Theme gallery, too. Let’s see when it will arrive there.
Since version 0.59.0 Hugo supports modules. To be honest I found it rather hard to understand how this works but also what the use cases are. Maybe my mindset is still too used to the WordPress world with all the hooks and filters.
However, I finally found a use case for a module. The purpose of the module is to bring in chartist.js functionality into Hugo. Basically the module is a wrapper that does all the hassle of providing the required resources so you only have to include the head-chartist.html partial into your theme’s header and you can start to create graphs.
I happily noticed that the number of (self-hosted) blogs I came across has increased recently. The latter ones feature some posts where people did a break down of the monthly costs for their blog. Great idea, let’s see what this means for sciolism.
Hosting & Domain
This blog runs on a small VPS hosted by DigitalOcean. The monthly costs are about $6. The domain is about 9€ per year with DNS being managed via DigitalOcean. The certificates for encryption are provided by Let’s Encrypt and are free of charge.
Software
As every blog or website this blog heavily relies on software. First of all there is the CMS or in this case the static site generator hugo which is free of charge. The webserver on the VPS is a nginx instance - free of charge, too. Other software like a FTP clients, text or graphic editors can hardly be attributed since they are used for multiple purposes.
Wrap up
In total the monthly costs are about 6-7€ which is absolutely ok and underlines that self-hosting is affordable. I think it is important to point out that the costs would be much higher with all components being charged, so it is a good opportunity for a big shout-out to the many (open-source) projects that help to run this blog.
Timeline with release dates of several projects. Dragons included.
Well, it has been a while…
I won’t comment in detail on what happened in the meanwhile and no, this will not be another of these “but this time I will not give up” posts but let me put it this way: Other things occupied all of my attention. However, things have settled and finally I couldn’t resists to reboot one of my former favorite hobbies: “that web stuff”. Such a restart of your ambitions is a good chance to challenge the status of your projects and see if stuff projects can be sorted out.
