A little while ago, I finally got around to revamping my website generation. I’d been using Blosxom for nearly two decades, but I’d also been meaning to move to something a bit newer for a while. So now I’m using Hugo.
Most of my stuff ported over without too much difficulty. I’d been using Markdown with Blosxom, so it translated pretty cleanly to Hugo, with the just the addition of some front matter to each file. Some of the Blosxom plugins I used had their own de facto front matter, so it was just a matter of changing it into YAML.
Overall, Hugo is very nice. Its server mode and draft posts are particularly useful as I write things. There were many times I wanted to preview a post in Blosxom and didn’t have a good way to do so. Hugo solves that problem. Draft posts let me work on things in the same repository as my published work without making things live until they’re ready.
Because Hugo facilitates working with the website as a whole much more
readily, I also finally developed a proper deployment mechanism. It’s
just a Makefile with a few lines to generate intermediate files, run
hugo to generate the HTML, and then scp the files to my webhost. But
having that automation makes it far easier to update things. I could
have done something similar with Blosxom, but Hugo has better affordances
for it.
While I was at it, I also reworked my website theme. I’ve had a lot more design practice since I put together the old theme. While I might not say I’m good at this yet, I think I’ve at least gotten better. You can compare, say, the old version and new version of my ebook post to see some of the difference.
I doubt anyone outside of me really care about the particulars of this website design. But in case you do, the theme is available on GitLab.