Crazy Project - Part Trois

Here we go again: I’ve been working on yet another reboot of this blog. And yes, I’m switching platforms again. This time I’m going with Hugo, another static site generator but much more straightforward than Gatsby. I have been using Hugo for some experimental blogs for some time and have migrated all “old” content from the GravCMS-based blog.

I have also spent quite a bit of time learning more about customizing themes in Hugo and have put some effort into defining a flexible taxonomy. I’m also planning to publish different types of posts — regular blog posts, shorter notes, and series of posts that belong together (e.g. stories from multi-day trips, etc.).

Another difference from my previous adventures in “blog land” is that my blogs will now be hosted on the DigitalOcean App Platform rather than on full virtual hosts. This means no DevOps tasks to worry about, and the actual publishing process is now fully automated. In fact, the site rebuild process is triggered automatically when code and/or content is pushed to the main branch of the git repo.

Of course, this also means that I will have to adopt some branching strategy to avoid accidentally triggering unnecessary rebuilds. And yes, it is possible to leave posts in draft mode, so they don’t get published. However, checking them into the main branch would still trigger a rebuild.

I’m also working on a workflow that will allow me to write content in Obsidian, as that would let me draft posts on my phone or iPad. I may also be able to check in drafts to a temporary branch from Obsidian using some git plugin.

So yes, I’m rebuilding and retooling again. But these updates represent a significant step towards a very flexible yet straightforward writing and publishing process.