Setting up a personal academic homepage

There are virtually unlimited options available for building a personal homepage. One can find several options based on the purpose, aesthetics, technologies and difficulty.

Some of the easiest options include Google Sites, WordPress etc. If one wants to have a bit more control and customizability, there are static site builders like Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, etc. which can be hosted on GitHub Pages, Netlify etc. For an academic portfolio, I found “Hugo Academic” to be perfect, both aesthetically and feature-wise.

“Hugo Academic” comes with an easy deployment option to Netlify, which doesn’t require the user to write any code. To deploy it to GitHub is not as straightforward and too many guides for too many versions might confuse a novice user. Here, I am listing down the steps I followed to setup this website.

Get Started using GitHub Template

• Install Hugo
• Go to “Hugo Academic” Starter Template
• Click on Use this template to create a repository www (you may choose a different name)
• Clone your repository locally git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/www.git www
• cd www
• git submodule update --init --recursive
• Create an empty repository <your-username>.github.io on GitHub, if you haven’t already.
  • Note: If you do not have GitHub premium, this must be a public repository in order to use GitHub Pages
  • Set-up the GitHub Pages from repository settings.
• Add the website repository as a submodule, git submodule add -f -b master git@github.com:<your-username>/<your-username>.github.io.git public
• Edit content in the content directory
• Test locally, hugo server
• Generate public pages, hugo. This will generate the static website in the public/ directory.
• Commit content to the submodule (website repository) first, cd public, git add . and git commit -m "Website"
• Commit content to the base repository, git add . and git commit -m "Content"

Reference

Documentation: https://wowchemy.com/docs/