The last couple of months I have been working on a various personal projects of which one was the redesign of my personal website for publishing my images. Over years I have been relying on WordPress for my personal website. Lately I decided to try a faster and newer technology compared to WordPress. The new website uses a modern technology stack and is designed to be a mobile-first page with a clear focus on presenting my images. Furthermore, I have spent considerable time on reediting some of my images from the past and new images which I took with my new Canon EOS R camera the last 2 years. The used technologies will shortly be described in small sections below:

Hugo

For my new website I decided to choose the static site generator HUGO due to the positive feedback which I found during my analysis for a new technology stack. My old website was built around the content management system WordPress which capabilities I never fully utilized and comes along with several downsides which are heavily being discussed on the web. The two primary reasons for me were security and speed which are both handled well in HUGO. Another reason for switching to HUGO was that I wanted my website to be built in a mobile-first manner where the display of my images was the key objective. For that matter I decided to choose an existing HUGO theme provisioned by Curt Timson and adjust it to my needs with a justified gallery and lightbox from MFG92 to view the images in fullscreen.

GitHub

I developed the webpage locally on my Linux machine and used GitHub as my code repository where I do collaborate with many other people on different topics such as Exiv2. In addition, GitHub serves as the basis for my continuous integration and deployment workflow with Netlify.

Netlify

Most of the traffic on this website comes from all over the world which is why I don’t host my website in a single country. I decided to use and leverage the offering from Netlify which instantly builds and deploys my website to their global content delivery network. It comes along with a modern GIT integration for your CI delivery workflow and some Admin UIs for managing the website’s deployment.