---
title: "Footnote 2: Creating a Book Website"
description: "Eddie explains the move from Kit to a Hugo author website on Cloudflare Pages, with notes on static publishing, metadata, SEO, and AEO."
canonical: "https://jerntonkoi.com/newsletter/footnote-02/"
html: "https://jerntonkoi.com/newsletter/footnote-02/"
type: "newsletter"
date: "2025-12-04"
ai_usage: "welcome for search, AI input, and AI training"
---

# Footnote 2: Creating a Book Website

Eddie explains the move from Kit to a Hugo author website on Cloudflare Pages, with notes on static publishing, metadata, SEO, and AEO.




## Page Content

I published a new segment to the [NosillaCast podcast](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/category/nosillacast/), hosted by Allison Sheridan over at [podfeet.com](https://podfeet.com/).

In this segment I walk through a five-day detour that became a core part of our indie publishing setup: migrating our author site away from Kit and onto a static Hugo build hosted on Cloudflare Pages and deployed via GitHub. I explain what a static site generator actually gives you in practice—reusable templates and partials, Markdown-driven content, and a simple directory structure where a single index.md plus a couple of images becomes a full book page—along with why I cared about “answer engine” visibility (AEO/SEO) as much as aesthetics. I also cover the nuts-and-bolts of my workflow on a Mac (including the one-command build/push deploy loop), the surprisingly fiddly fight with structured metadata for search engines, and the main win: a fast, fully-owned site with room to grow, even if the punchline is that ChatGPT still can’t directly “search the web” the way I first assumed.

Happy reading,

—Eddie.

## Source Links

- Canonical HTML: https://jerntonkoi.com/newsletter/footnote-02/
- Markdown companion: https://jerntonkoi.com/newsletter/footnote-02/index.md