I was out of ideas for a new blog entry so I thought I’d migrate my blog from Jekyll to Hugo and make it a little more minimalistic. The main driving factors were:
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I don’t like how web browsers have become overly complicated–essentially virtual machines executing code and becoming their own app platform. See this essay for more details. I’d like to practice what I preach and make it so that my blog doesn’t require javascript.
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I had to run Jekyll in a docker image because of all the dependencies/setup. Hugo is easier to install and run, so less friction for new blog posts.
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I didn’t want to use a third-party theme that did all the magic/code generation. It was easy enough to copy another site’s code.
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I wanted to be able to self-host this blog fairly easily. Basically have a git CD scirpt that runs hugo and uploads the output to a web server I control. GitHub pages works great and is free, but I think the FOSS ethos is a lot about self-sufficiency, and I’d like to own the whole blog end-to-end.
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I’m looking for little hobby projects that don’t take too long to complete and this one was pretty easy.
How to migrate? Well I basically ran hugo import
jekyll, then used
Drew’s site (see link above) as a template, and hand edited a lot of
things (since it was imported from Jekyll). One nifty feature I found
(maybe this can be a future blog post) was using Emacs’s Wdired
mode
(dired-toggle-read-only), then using macros (C-x () to bulk rename
files in a directory. I’m trying to replace my terminal usage with
Emacs.