I think that all my friends should have a website where they can write about the things they find interesting, about their daily insights, no matter how irrelevant! But I think that for many this might seem to be a quite intimidating endeavour to take up without enough technical knowledge, even though in reality it is not all that complicated.

Update 2025: If you are not technically inclined, just use bearblog. It is build with the small web in mind, exportable, customizable, but minimal. And its business model does also seem sustainable. If you are technical and want to get into static sites, this site runs on Hugo, and is hosted on Gitlab Pages.

That is why I decided to write up a quick guide on how to create a site just like the one I have here. I know that all the different parts of this are nothing that you couldn’t already find manifold on the internet, but I want to ease the process of compiling all this information into a working static site. This will not cost you anything, as we host the whole thing on gitlab pages. Only the optional domain name could incurr costs, but if you are fine with a domin that ends in “gitlab.io”, this will be included in the free version. Technical knowledge will also not be too much of a barrier. We might have to touch the command line once or twice, but the day to day proccess of working with the site happens purely in a graphical user interface…