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:

1. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
4. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
6. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
7. What’s your favourite post on your blog?
8. 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. 

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.

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.