02 Apr 2025
Welcome to Gopher Rodeo! This is my website and blog. I should probably introduce myself somewhat. I'm Dan, I'm a nerd from London and I've been working in IT for over 16 years. I've been a tinkerer for much longer than that. I'm neurodivergent and over the years I have had a huge amount of projects I have picked up and then dropped. I am trying not to beat myself up about that!
Most recently I have bought a domain for myself and finally decided to actually create a website and blog. Rather than make things easy for myself and use a content management system or something user-friendly to create my website I wanted to investigate static site generators. I think they're a really interesting technology and wanted an excuse to investigate them.
I initially wanted to use Hugo, but I just found it too restrictive. It seemed to be very geared towards blogs and not much else. After that I settled on using Zola. I did use a Hugo theme called Coder for the basis of the theme I created. With Zola I had to create the theme from scratch but luckily my amazing partner has a Masters in website design so was able to give me lots of help in that area.
So far my experience has been pretty good, I'm still learning everything that's possible with the templates but at least for now this seems to work pretty well!