All Change

4 1/2 years between posts. Though it seems an eternity in Internet time i bet i'm still not a record-breaker.

This blog used to be hosted at Blogger but i decided to take it down when i also shut down my server.

For a couple of years i had no website, but a couple of years ago i set up a FreeNAS server at home to store my media. Since it's always on i figured i'd just run a FreeBSD jail on it, install Nginx and self-host a simple site.

I didn't need much, just a couple of static pages i hand-crafted the HTML for. Since there were only a few pages i decided not to bother with the overhead of a database for a blog. I briefly toyed with the idea of hand-crafting blog entries using HTML but that seemed far too much effort.

Lately there seems to have been an upswell of interest in Static Site Generators so i decided to take a look too, in the hope that without having to craft my own HTML i might be more prone to put up content.

There seem to be quite a lot of Static Site Generators out there, but most seem to have lots of dependencies. I'm really not interested in compiling or installing a lot of stuff.

In the end i went with a relatively new project called Hugo. It's written in Go and has a single binary.

For the last week i've been playing with it and have got it to mostly do what i want. There are a few niggles that are supposed to be fixed in the next version and i'm pretty sure my other issues are things that can be made to work, i'm just not familiar enough with it yet to figure out how.

Over the last week i've created my own Hugo theme that replicates my old site (with a few tweaks).

Hugo is very fast. It copies files and (re)generates the static HTML for this whole site in just 13ms. That's pretty damn impressive.

One of the great things about Hugo is that i can just write my content in Markdown (i'm using Haroopad to write this post right now!), drop that Markdown file into my content directory and Hugo will spit out a HTML file using my theme.

This ease of creating content might actually inspire me to write more stuff.

Since i had a dump of my old Blogger posts i decided to convert them to Markdown and bring them along for the ride. It's interesting to see that i'm not using any of the stuff i previously posted about and i think i might just post a bit of follow-up to my old posts in the near future.

I'm going to continue playing with Hugo, and i definitely need to look at my CSS (which, other than a few font tweaks today, hasn't seen any changes in around 7 or 8 years), but i'm pretty optimistic and even if i don't stick with Hugo i think i'm going to stick with Markdown for my content.