This is a New Website

So you may have noticed that there haven’t been many blog posts on this site in the last couple of months. And that was after me being on quite the roll. Well, it turns out that the static site generator that I had been using for a couple of years had shit the bed and I couldn’t get it to work no matter what I tried. It turns out the maintainer of the app, 11ty, pushed some updates that caused some conflicts and the only way to solve that issue was to wait until the next manor release.

Whenever that might be.

So, I decided that I needed something new and more reliable. After looking into it, I decided that I would go with Hugo. Not an inspired choice, since a lot of people use it, but it was the only one I could really get my head around. It turned out to be fairly simple, and I may end up making a video about it eventually.

When I say it was simple, I mean the installation. Creating a theme and getting it up on GitLab ended up being a chore and a half, but over the course of two days, I got it mostly done. The site you are reading this on looks an awful lot like the old one, and that is by design. I like this design so I did my best to replicate it as much as possible. Would it have been easier to use a pre-made theme? Maybe. But this ended up being more rewarding, even if it did take a long time. I just copied another theme so that I could have a template, and then massively altered it to look like what I had before.

Along the way I created several new scripts that will help me make this easier, and I polished up on my CSS again, which is great.

So What’s New

Nothing, for you guys, really outside of the new commenting system. For me, it’s hopefully going to be a stable and easy experience to update this blog. I guess we’ll see.

As for comments, I’m going to use disqus for now. I had a couple other options, but none of them really made me very happy. Not that I’m all that excited about disqus either, but it will do for now at least. If you have ideas for a commenting option that doesn’t rely on GitHub or on a self-hosted database, and that isn’t too expensive, leave a comment below.

What’s Missing?

RSS isn’t here yet. I will set that up in a couple of days. Unfortunately, this will mean that you will have to update your RSS subscriptions when this is done if you want the feed to keep working. I will post on Mastodon when this is done.

Also, the backlog of episodes for the podcast aren’t here yet. I don’t just want to make them new posts in the feed, so I will need to figure out how to create their own feed. That may take me awhile.

Also, the links to the extra pages linked at the bottom are all broken. I will get those fixed once I figure out how.

I will be making a lot of changes to this site as time goes on and I learn more about Hugo, so come back often.