It seems reasonable, in the spirit of self-documentation, for the first real post to this site to describe the creation of the site itself.

Hosting

The precipitating event for creating this site was my finding out about the .ooo TLD, which formed a clear domain hack with my family name.

I used Google Domains to test URLs for availability and eventually settled on this one, then completed the purchase through Google Domains.

I chose GitLab Pages for hosting. I considered GitHub Pages initially, but when I could neither access my GitHub account (second factor and recovery codes all failed) nor recover it (still waiting on response from GitHub support), I went with a different option.

Site Generation

I tested a few static site generators and their online HOWTO guides.

I first tried Zola. After completing the HOWTO, I could not get themes to work. I probably messed up my config.toml.

I then tried Jekyll. After completing the HOWTO, I could not get themes to work. I likely used bundler incorrectly. After fussing with my Gemfile, it seemed unlikely that the resulting local configuration was reproducible and further doubtful that a CI/CD pipeline would emit matching results.

At this point, I took a break, planning to try one more system before falling back to writing raw HTML.

A day or two later, I tried Hugo. After completing the HOWTO, I was able to get themes to work. Integrating with GitLab Pages worked as doc-ed.

Configuring the custom domain required a few attempts in the GitLab UI and Google Domains UI, either because of user error, DNS propagation times, or both.