Does Anybody Blog Anymore?

A little after 11pm on a Thursday night and I’ve just finished¹ the migration of my ‘blog from Wordpress to Hugo, the static-site generator written in Go. It was actually reasonably easy considering I had quite a few posts and pages, not to mention the content types provided by various plugins.

(But it’s 2019: does anybody blog anymore?)

Hugo has taken a little bit of getting used to, but I’m definitely liking it more as I use it. Content is authored in Markdown, for one thing, and the render templates use the same Go-Template language that I’m using for templating files in Helmfiles and charts, which makes it somewhat transferable. There are plenty of themes to start with and customize, and even a “deployment service” at forestry.io if I decide I need a visual editor. Migration was via a Wordpress plugin, with the slight complication that I needed to spin up a local Wordpress to actually get the conversion plugin to run — but even that was pretty straightforward with docker-compose.

(Seriously, folks write Medium posts and share photos on Instagram, but ‘blogging? I’m sure a hardcore base will tell you that blogging is still cool/profitable/engaging/worthwhile, but I’m not convinced. On the other hand, I’ve never really had any readers, and this is mostly just a journal that I can go back to myself when I fancy it, so perhaps I shouldn’t care either way?)

So if you’re in fact not just me, and this website hasn’t gone through another theme and/or platform transition … have a look around! So of the neat features I’ve got at the moment are: “dark” and “light” mode; estimated reading time; some subtle animation; mostly responsive design; and then big one: automagic linking between named pages. (Read the About Me page to see how that works.)

There’s plenty left to do, of course:

• Implement pagination for the posts. (They go back to 2004!)
• Add a search box. That could be fun.
• Group the projects by category
• Review and edit most of the notes — too many of them are copy-paste HTML rather than proper Markdown, and that makes me sad.
• …
• Profit²!

I should definitely go to bed soon, as we’re doing a production release tomorrow and I want to be alert in case something goes wrong; unlikely but not impossible. I’ll take my shiny little laptop, blue-blocker glasses and finish this post from the comfort of our mattress on the floor, then switch on my lucid-dream-encouraging eyemask get some shut-eye — which of course are all things I should probably explain! Another post!