Rebuilding the site
Rebuilding the site
In December, I set out to move my site from the previous static site generator, Jekyll, to a brand new one, Hugo. Perhaps inevitably, this job turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. Equally inevitably, I wildly overestimated my enthusiasm for hacking away at this over Christmas. As such, here we are at the start of February and it’s (just about) finished.
The site was previously put together using Jekyll. This is a ruby-based static site generator that takes a heap of markdown files, mashes them through a bunch of templates and generates some HTML.
The new static site generator, Hugo, does more or less the same, but is written in Go. So why change? Well… mostly for the fun of doing so, if I’m honest. There’s a bunch of advantages (I can write Go, I can’t write Ruby; it’s slightly faster; it’s got a large current dev community behind it) but none are so big as to really merit this change.
I’ve also used this change to move to running this site with Infrastructure-as-code at the heart of the setup. It’s hosted in AWS Amplify, which is astonishingly easy to setup, and managed by Pulumi. There are a few benefits here:
The only necessary code or config that isn’t in the repo now is the DNS settings. These are managed in Cloudflare using Terraform/Pulumi. They’re only separate because they live alongside a bunch of other, unrelated DNS stuff.
Over at /chopping-mall is something I’m very pleased to have restored: my first blog. I wrote on Chopping Mall intermittently for several years ~2010. It’s always bothered me that it was held in Blogspot / Blogger with no easy way to export it. But no more! I found some XML export and Hugo import tools and now have all the old posts in Markdown, in the repo. There are some broken links and images to sort through, but the vast majority is there.
I’ve split out /walks into its own dedicated site section. Still with maps. Still with files you can download. I’m edging slowly away from Geojson file (lovely open format, yay! Not exported by OS Maps app, boo!) to GPX files.
My hope is that my renewed enthusiasm for this blog will get me using it to build up interesting things bit-by-bit. I’m intending to do booklists, filmlists and so on, and generally use it a bit more. Let’s see…