Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash. I’ve been chugging along with Hugo for a minute, but you just know I have to try every new thing I discover, so… bssg.baty.net How fun is that!? Written by Stefano Marinelli, BSSG is so simple and easy to use that I had a blog started in, I swear, two minutes. The only thing I had to do was change MARKDOWN_PROCESSOR to use pandoc, and I was off and running. Nice. ...
For a while, I tried maintaining a combined RSS feed that included posts from all my sundry blogs. I kept it at /everything.rss. It was managed as part of my WordPress blog, and since I’ve stopped using WordPress, I’ve been redirecting /everything.rss to the feed for baty.net, which is either /feed or /index.xml, depending on my blog platform of the day. I think that instead of that, I’ll piggyback off my @batybot account on Mastodon.social. I crosspost most stuff from my sites to @batybot via EchoFeed already, and Mastodon offers an rss feed for each account. Mine is https://mastodon.social/@batybot.rss. ...
Currently, my blog has two types of posts, Journal and Post. Journal entries are comprised of things I collect or think about during each day. I post one per day. Posts are your typical blog post. Posts are (usually) a bit longer and are about a single topic. ...
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple years forcing various blogging platforms to behave the way I want them to. That is: Daily notes grouped by day, with stand-along posts scattered between. ...
Pagefind makes me happy. It is a static search library that is so easy to configure and use that I can hardly believe it. Here’s a quick summary of how I implemented Pagefind search here in the Anubis2 Hugo theme1. ...
I came this close to moving my blog at baty.net back to Hugo. Even worse, I considered archiving all the content and starting fresh. I mean, completely fresh. No more dragging around years of images and posts that have been converted to and from several Markdown formats for various blogging engines. I still may, but I’ve given myself a reprieve this morning. Sort of. ...
I was tagged by Kev Quirk to complete a “Blog Questions Challenge”, so here we go. The questions are: Why did you start blogging in the first place? What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? When do you feel most inspired to write? Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? What’s your favourite post on your blog? Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? ...
One of the things that frustrated me about Kirby last year was handling code/template changes vs content changes. I complained about it here. Ideally, since Kirby is a PHP CMS, I would do everything directly on the server. What I’ve done more often instead, is to run a full copy locally and rsync the final product (code, blueprints, content, images, etc.) to the production instance. Content is kept in plain text files, so both code and content changes need to be kept in sync. ...
It’s been nearly a month using Ghost, so it was time to switch back to Hugo.
OMG I never learn. Even when I write stuff down. Every time I switch back to Hugo, I complain about the fact that when using relative image links in Hugo’s Page Bundles, they don’t work in the RSS feed. Then I spend time digging around old forum posts or whatever trying to fix the problem. Except I already have fixed the problem. At least twice. Maybe just check your own notes, Jack. ...
I was bored and feeling some nostalgia about Hugo so here we are again.
Note Pagefind is no longer used on this site, due to a theme change. I was made aware of Pagefind via a post by Bryce Wray. Pagefind is… Pagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure. Pagefind.app They had me at “…without hosting any infrastructure”. The theme I used to use included a nice search using Lunr. My new theme uses Algolia, which I don’t love because it involves a separate, commercial service and requires rebuilding and pushing an updated index to the Algolia service every time I post something. ...
The quote from Robert Greene that I posted yesterday has thrown me a little: [People] are far too present and familiar, their every move displayed on social media. That might make you relatable, but it also makes you seem just like everyone else. Robert Greene I don’t know how I feel about the idea that posting so much about myself makes me seem the same as everyone else. I always figured it showed how I was different. The very last thing I want to do is be just like everyone else. ...
Here we are, running the show as a static blog, using Hugo. But why!? I suppose because I was bored and because it’s fun. ...
I finally did it. I broke this blog apart and archived 20 years of history. You see, I still wanted it to live here at baty.net but I didn’t want to keep lugging around 20 years of posts every time I built or deployed or moved things. So I started with a fresh copy of the theme, kept only the content from 2021, and moved all the archives to archive.baty.net. Yes, I understand that this means a bunch of broken links. I’m trying to find a good solution to that, but not letting it stop me. ...