Whatever you’d like!
I don’t think it’s too much different than it was 2 years ago, except for fediverse software like pixelfed or plume.
Decide how much of it you want to program yourself and find something that fits.
I have used various frameworks, including Wordpress, Drupal, Jekyll, Hugo, and minor various specialized minor projects, for personal websites, including blogs and galleries.
Sooner or later, one of the following happens:
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the underlying software has bugs, which remain unfixed or get fixed with a long lag. This happened a lot with eg Wordpress. I have to dig in, identify the bug, see if it is reported, then work around it, or find a new theme.
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the frameworks get more and more complex. This has been a constant pain point for me in eg Hugo, which has users with huge static websites (understandable, since Hugo is so fast). You have to keep up with advances because existing features are deprecated.
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Various mini-projects which just claim to do one thing and one thing only are abandonned and/or get feature creep (the latter, and then the former, usually).
I found that I was spending a lot of time keeping stuff working, not adding content.
So I would advise the following:
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if you already know a computer language you are familiar with, try to find a simple static website generator in that language. It should be nothing more than converting Markdown to HTML, adding a header, footer, and some simple substitutions, and run snippets coded in the programming language when you want them. These snippets will help you automate a lot of stuff. At the end of the day, you are just generating text (HTML).
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if you don’t find such a framework, just code up some HTML, CSS and Javascript (if applicable). In the long run it will be less work than debugging someone else’s buggy code, and much, much easier to customize.
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If you are not into either of these, just pay for a service.
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@Tamas_Papp completely agree with everything you’ve said. In fact I’ve been having great fun converting my website to use React/TypeScript doing much as you suggest - a combination of a simple markdown renderer for wiki pages, and a gallery site much as I was previously achieving with python/jquery.
The great thing is I know it will be what I need, no more, no less, and it will stay maintained and never suffer from feature creep. Oh and as a side-effect I’ll get better at coding in the programming languages that currently pay my bills.
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You may try Flask and jinja2 in your implementation too. Its based on python. I do not know though how well you could implement a portfolio website with these frameworks/servers though.
@markman8 not sure who you’re replying to there, but my original implementation did use Flask/jinja2. My new one doesn’t though, because I’m implementing an API using NodeJS/Express now, and retiring my jquery (which is a bit outdated now).
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My recommendation is not trying to think too hard about these things. There are a lot of developer types here and I know it’s hard. 
Let me just leave this here:
I know it’s about blogging, but it can easily be applied to over thinking the technicalities of a portfolio website.
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Mine is as much about learning the development process / love of coding as it is about putting content out there. I mostly don’t share the URL and just use it for documenting my own technical investigations and being able to access my photos when I’m away from home
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Hm, I might go this way actually, not sure yet. Being a full stack software developer for go backends and Angular frontends helps I’m sure 
But I thought I’d maybe leave the coding for the job. Not that I don’t have fun doing it … Great inspiration here anyway. I got hugo recommended from my colleague as well.
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We have used Hugo all over the place for stuff. The templating language is a little weird but its better than any other static site generator I’ve used
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As long as it’s a conscious decision to prioritize exploring web development. It was meant as a word of warning for those who are getting into a search for the best solution™️ when they just want publish their photography on the web.
I’ve been a Hugo user for many years and have not noticed this. What did they deprecate?
I’ve been looking at Hugo since forever but never transitioned due to metadata support. The support for image metadata is still weak right? You can only access plain exif no xmp or iptc. This can become quite annoying for a photo portfolio.
Correct.
But I’d just write a shell script to dump the wanted metadata into the metadata of the markdown file that references the image, then you can tap into the tagging template that hugo has.
It is usually in the release announcements, but you can find a lot by searching.
Don’t get me wrong: deprecations are a normal part of software lifecycle, and Hugo was getting better all the time, it’s just that for my personal website and blog it was overkill and keeping up with the ever changing taxonomy and template logic was not worth it. Hugo is probably the best static site generator for a medium or large site.
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Hi,
I just got a message that this thread is revived again and I thought it would be fair to get back to it and report what I did in the end. I programmed my own website. It’s a really simple grid thing and it took me maybe one week or so. There is not much more than a navbar, some text and then the images. I’m really pleased with the result and i had the time to do it. I had some experience with programming and was interested in doing it. But I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who has no experience and just wants to show some photographs. For these people I would recommend to search for some sites of photographers you like. Then check what they used (spoiler: squarespace ; ) ). Try to find something similar in the theme libraries of the common cms and set it up. Most of my colleagues set up their site and it will change once a year : ). But it always depends what you’r looking for and what knowledge you have.
Have fun and good luck.
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If someone’s interested and I can safe you some time I can send it to you and if you like it also the source code. Please pn.
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do you not just have a link to the live site?
Just some notes about comments, Disquss is adding in their free version ads - nothing wrong with ads IMHO, but they do add quite too much.
Graphcomments seems not maintained. So not suggested.
I tried also Comment-Sidecar - it’s PHP and mySQL based (means easy to import comments from other places). Seems also not maintained, buy works nicely.
Latest I tried is Isso Comments - Took me really a long time to make that work. Now I have a Docker install that works well on a few sites. Comments are in a SQLite3 DB. Once you work that out it’s also not too complicated to import comments from elsewhere.
Everything still with Hugo. For my testing I use a free VPS via the Oracle Free Tier Cloud.
As an alternative to disqus, I’ve been looking into remark42 - it’s easy to setup and seems to have a nice set of features.
I used to use Disqus, but got fed up with their ads and UI clumsiness. After failing to get any of the OSS commenting systems to run on my host, I settled for a payed Hyvor instance. It’s a drop-in replacement for Disqus, with a price tag instead of ads.