Website hosting changed
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So I just changed the hosting for my website. It’s now hosted using Hugo and on GitHub pages. Long story short, if anything seems broken, Contact me
This is because Django2 support is coming to an end and Zinnia (the blogging engine I used with Django) never got support to move it to Django3. So after at least 6 years, it’s time for a new site.
Honestly, the technical of this is not that interesting.
Some improvements
I took the opportunity to make some improvements to the theme I’m using. It’s now more responsive and (hopefully) more helpfully responsive as screen size shifts.
Why Hugo?
Mostly because this is a static site. I don’t use any non-static features on my website, so why use (and pay for) something more complicated than I need?
As a side effect, this reduces the amount of software I need to keep up to date, removes two daily cron job emails, and shuts down a web server.
I also like writing in Markdown. I keep my personal notes in Markdown when working on projects, so this will make it much easier to convert them over to posts – hopefully meaning I won’t have years-long spells without posting any more!
Hugo is also nice because it’s written in Go. Normally I object from a security perspective, but for an offline tool like this where I simply need it to be able to regenerate the output, it’s perfect. It doesn’t matter what happens to the Hugo project; I’ll be able to rebuild this website and keep adding to it. And after having Zinnia silently end support and force me to move away from it, this seems like a major feature to me.
Still to come
- Flesh out “Publications and Appearances”
- More theme improvements?
Some Hugo technical details
I made some configuration changes to the base Hugo configuration in order to make the site do everything I want. Here they are.
Tweaking URLs to include date codes
My old site used date codes as part of post URLs. While I would probably just use a slug these days (and would put all blog content under /blog instead of /), I don’t want to break URL backwards compatibility. So let’s turn on date-coded URLs for things in the /blog folder (and remove the /blog prefix).
[permalinks]
'blog' = '/:year/:month/:day/:slug'
I did consider only setting this up for old posts and using a new scheme for new posts. But in the end, it’s just a URL format and it wasn’t worth figuring out how to have both appear at the same time. I could also have used aliases, but without a real server and HTTP 301 redirects, that seemed too likely to cause problems.
Extensions
I added a couple of extensions for minor functionality
Email cloaking
One of reasons I don’t like having a dynamic site is that I keep getting spam via my contact form. Which is fair, since I don’t have a captcha on there. But nonetheless, something which lets people easily reach me without creating a lot of spam sounds great. So let’s add the hugo-cloak-email module:
$ git submodule add https://github.com/martignoni/hugo-cloak-email.git themes/hugo-cloak-email
Cloning into '/home/steve/Documents/Projects/pressers.name/themes/hugo-cloak-email'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 91, done.
remote: Total 91 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 91
Receiving objects: 100% (91/91), 34.11 KiB | 2.13 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (35/35), done.
Add add hugo-cloak-email as the leftmost entry in the themes.
--- config.toml 2022-03-15 21:35:30.520928238 +0100
+++ config.toml 2022-03-15 21:35:03.908571845 +0100
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
baseURL = "https://pressers.name/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "The Electronic Press"
-theme = [ "hugo-cloak-email", "pressers.name" ]
+theme = "pressers.name"
[permalinks]
'blog' = '/:year/:month/:day/:slug'
Social Metadata
This one requires theme integration. In order to make it possible for pages to appear in specific and pretty ways on social media, let’s add the hugo-social-metadata module:
$ git submodule add https://github.com/msfjarvis/hugo-social-metadata.git themes/hugo-social-metadata
Cloning into '/home/steve/Documents/Projects/pressers.name/themes/hugo-social-metadata'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 52, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (52/52), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
remote: Total 52 (delta 18), reused 47 (delta 13), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (52/52), 12.25 KiB | 6.13 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18/18), done.
--- config.toml 2022-03-15 21:43:01.851111250 +0100
+++ config.toml 2022-03-15 21:41:12.557595136 +0100
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
baseURL = "https://pressers.name/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "The Electronic Press"
-theme = [ "hugo-social-metadata", "hugo-cloak-email", "pressers.name" ]
+theme = [ "hugo-cloak-email", "pressers.name" ]
[permalinks]
'blog' = '/:year/:month/:day/:slug'