🎉 Build your digital twin

Welcome 👋

Since the dawn of human civilization, we have been talking about the transformation of one or other kind. In this digital age, when human and machine interaction has increased manifolds, it has already started shaping ourself be it the fruits of our hard work in form of digital currencies, our creativity like composing music and writing a novel by AI machines, or communicating with human-like chatbots. The best way to respond to this change between carbon-based life and silicon-based life is by merging our identities with machines in forms of bits and bytes. Conventionally, bytes are used to store memory and bits for streaming the data. A baby step would be first to register our presence by building a personal websites. These websites would be the digital warehouses where we can store the relevant information and communicate it with the outer world.

In this blog, I will give you a brief yet complete tutorial to build your personal website. So let’s start…

Why consider building your website with HUGO/Blogdown/Netlify

• A lightning-fast response (usually it takes a fraction of second to respond the edit)
• A robust and easily maintainable static website generator with HUGO. No server side knowledge required.
• Simple markdown files help you to write scientific blogs including cool graphics and daunting mathematical equations. User-friendly deployment on a host server with Netlify.

Get Started

• 👉 Create a new site
• 📚 Personalize your site
• Quickly check the website preview for the changes locally in your browser from terminal: hugo server –disableFastRender.
• Once happy with the changes, stage your directory to your Github repo: git add . ; git commit -m “Fixed bug in login flow”
• Push it to the Github: git push origin main.

One can personalize the content of the website by editing the ‘content’ and ‘static’ folders. The folder’s name are self explanatory however you still need to spend some time here to understand the role of each file and the effect on editing. A good point of start would be ‘conf.toml’ file. Feel free to explore here all the options and for more information, please read the references provided at the end of this blog.

Deployment

Now that you have build your stunning website, it’s time to deploy it to a host server. Don’t worry! we will do it in the easiest way possible with a user friendly website Netlify. Link your Github repo to the netlify account. You can further customize the URL for example “name.netlify.com” with the domain settings tab. You are all set to copy this brand new URL into your browser. Now each time your Github repo gets updated, it will get automatically deployed and published by the netlify.

Congratulations 👏. Time to welcome your digital identity into the world!