For the longest of time I have been interested in Static Site Generators. I would go to the websites of Hugo, Pelican, Nikola etc. take a look at their getting started guide and close the browser window.
I am an autodidact. Among other things I like to learn languages and I taught myself Quranic Arabic from scratch using lots of online and free resources. I am also teaching Quranic Arabic to ladies in my locality, but I wanted to reach out to those who want to learn Quranic Arabic (it being a part of our religion Islam) but don’t have the time or opportunity to enroll in a class.
So last month I started putting together a blog post where I listed all the resources which I myself have used. While writing the post I had an idea to structure the resources into courses, so people could set targets and organize their study. I called it “A Pathway to Arabic through self-study”.
After publishing the post, I went ahead and created a Trello board for the pathway, so people could track and share their progress. I also realized that I have way too many resources which still need to be added and this pathway was getting beyond the scope of a simple blogpost.
I started researching different methods of documenting these resources. Moodle and other course managemnet systems were an over kill for my purpose and so were wikis. I was considering making a github page for it but I wanted more flexibility. Then I stumbled across the Material document theme for Hugo and that looked like the perfect solution to my problem.
The problem was that I was tight on time, (I am mother of three unschooling kids and a learner myself) and static site generators looked like lots of work. I once again went to Jekyll, Octopress, Nikola, Pelican and Hugo websites and out of all these Hugo looked the easiest. Mostly because although it is written in Go, it comes as a binary so I didn’t need to install and configure any additional stuff on my machine. (like for Jekyll I would need Ruby)
I downloaded Hugo, fiddled with the theme, came across a couple of obstacles (especially when due to Hugo’s update the index.md file was swallowing other routes and needed to be renamed _index.md) but overall the process went smooth enough and in a few hours my site was up and running.
I even conquered my fear of writing in Markdown and I am really enjoying writing content for my new static site. And even though I am maintaining this site with Publii, I am tempted to move it to Hugo. But that is for another time.
Lesson learned: Things look more complicated than they are when you look at them from the side line. Diving in is the only way to go!