Migrating my website to Cloudflare Pages

My personal website is now on Cloudflare Pages, migrated from Obsidian Publish.

Obsidian Publish is a great platform, and deploying my website from my notes app was intriguing. I had set out to reduce friction and facilitate a writing habit, but this clearly did not pan out as I had hoped. I’ll continue to be an Obsidian user, but it will also be nice to keep my notes separate from my public site.

Keeping the notes and site coupled did occasionally cause problems. I even had a front matter template that included publish: false, but that did not prevent accidental publication. Nothing personal or sensitive, just ordinary scratch notes that I didn’t want on my website. The website now lives in its own Git repository, separate from my Obsidian notes.

I’m also finding that my motivation to write is more strongly tied to tinkering and building things. That’s why a Hugo-based site, where I have more control and flexibility, feels like a better fit.

Cloudflare Pages is free for this use, and the migration was mostly uneventful. I already managed my DNS through Cloudflare, so there was no major domain or routing change to work through. The site initially failed to build because Pages’ default Hugo version was older than the version I used locally, but setting the HUGO_VERSION environment variable fixed that.

I’m treating this migration as a starting point for more projects on gabbert.me. I want my website to accommodate things I build, not just things I write. And hopefully, a site that is more interesting to work on will also make the publishing process feel more intentional.