Hugo

So it’s been some time again since I last posted, which I feel like is to be expected at this point. I think I’ve just ended up being busy, or rather not really thinking about writing as much lately, and as such also ended up writing a lot less. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I’d like to rename this blog to, as while I’m not sure how fitting the name currently is I also don’t really have any ideas what I’d like to change it to.

What I have changed, however, is moving the blog back to Hugo. This change was caused by a few things:

1. I wanted to move away from Cloudflare for all my services (this blog was the final thing that still needed moving)
2. I wanted to move away from using Ghost as my backend because they are deprecating MariaDB which I want to continue using over MySQL—I just don’t trust Oracle to be a good actor
3. Since I was changing things up anyway, I took the opportunity to simplify things, and moved back to a pure SSG-setup
4. I chose Hugo over continuing to use Eleventy because I would now be self-hosting these things instead of throwing everything into the cloud, and as such I just prefer having a single binary instead of the mess that is a JS-installation¹

I did do some exploring of other headless CMS but ended up deciding against moving to something else since I just kind of worried that I might end up in the same position I was in already with Ghost where I have to move again or the like due to some dependency changing, and also because it just ended up being one less thing that I need to maintain which is nice. I also don’t really have any problem with writing things in Markdown or other markup languages so the appeal of a more visual editor just isn’t really there for me. Sure, there are some convenience things that are a lot easier that I covered when I was first thinking of moving off Hugo and onto WordPress, but many of those things ended up being not that useful for me. For example, in the last iteration I already didn’t have any comments, because that ended up being annoying to implement with the headless setup I was using anyway; as for things like scheduling posts, I did it for fun several times but I’m just not sure if it adds any real value at the moment.²

I also used this opportunity to fix/re-implement some of the redirects I had going on before, that broke when I migrated over to Eleventy I think? This should mean some links that were broken should be working again now, which is nice. I feel somewhat embarassed about having contributed to link rot because of how frustrated I get at times when I see it on other sites, so hopefully all of that is fixed now. Other than that, as far as reader-facing changes go, there shouldn’t really be any yet.

Well, except for one small thing: the format of the links got somewhat updated again, all of my posts are now under the /post/ subfolder, or section as Hugo calls them. It doesn’t really affect the experience of browsing the site, but the links look a bit different once again.³

What sections mean, however, is that I can more clearly delineate some of the rough draft ideas I’ve had sitting around for a bit: dreams and fiction. It somehow didn’t (or at least doesn’t anymore) feel quite right to post these things simply into the main feed, but I have on occasion been writing my dreams down when I found them particularily interesting as a sort of dream diary, and it feels like sharing them under a different section from the main blog could be interesting. If I do end up doing that (still just thinking about the idea, but the change makes it easier to implement if I end up wanting to), it probably won’t mean that I would publish every dream I have, just the ones that seem interesting enough to do so with for whatever reason; maybe because they deal with a particular topic that might be of interest to someone else than me, or because they are just that strange.

As for fiction, it’s also something I kind of do want to write but never end up sitting down and just doing. I think one of my problesm there is that I like having done things more than doing them, so I get impatient while writing something like that and want to finish it which doesn’t really fit with my goal of also writing something somewhat longer form and as such my interest ends up fizzling out before I have the opportunity to finish actually writing anything. So I guess that means we’ll see if anything ever comes out of my idea to also include some fiction writing on this site, but at least the idea is there.

Beyond that, I’m also considering re-introducing a way to comment or at least somehow communicate back to me. As it stands, I don’t really give out any identifying information or channels to contact me on this blog, which while it has served me well so far I’m not sure if it is the way I want to keep things. Sure, the last time around when I had comments they weren’t really used, but maybe something like an about-page where I at the very least list an email address or some way to contact me might be a good thing to have available (though I have no doubt I would end up getting mostly spam to any such address).

For now though, that ends my ramblings on this topic, and I’ll get back to considering how to proceed from here. I would still kind of like to write more, but about what?