Hewwo? Is this thing on?

After over half a year of dragging it out and being distracted by other things, I finally managed to set up a blog!

CMS?

My original idea was to actually write some kind of CMS and possibly ActivityPub integration for comments/reading. This didn’t really work out. As it turns out doing such a thing is quite more effort than it’s worth, and it also means you have to take care of things like moderation features yourself.

I also briefly considering using the backend from Lemmy and modifying it despite the devs being people I don’t really vibe with for political reasons. It already has most of what you’d need in a blog and all the federation features, but upon learning about the state of the codebase I decided against it. It was also still a bit too much effort, and I’m a lazy folf.

Hugo to the rescue!

So, wait a minute… I want to write text documents and have them visible on the internet, so what’s the point of running all this code on the server?

At that point I’d heard of static site generators, but didn’t really consider the idea further. Oddly enough it was when I had to create a website for work that I decided to look into it further, and I settled on Hugo.

It’s quite a joy to do things this way, there’s no database to worry about, making a template is dead simple without any frameworks or complexity imposed upon you, the only gripe I have with Hugo specifically is go’s templates, which (I’m sorry) look like an absolute monstrosity! I was quite used to the diet syntax, so even seeing naked HTML tags is a bit noisy for me, but thankfully you only need to write your templates once, so I can live with that.

What about the comments though?

That’s where some stolen JavaScript comes in! I already have an account on a Mastodon instance where I’ll be linking to my stuff, so I can pull all of the comments from there, and it works really nicely. I modified the code slightly to my liking and made it load upon scrolling, hopefully that doesn’t put too much load on the instance. (Who am I kidding, nobody’s gonna read this anyway…)

Search?

There’s PageFind! That’s another thing I found for work and was amazed by how well it performs. It’s just another postprocessing step after generating the site with Hugo, and it’s entirely client-side from there.

Closing thoughts

So what’s the plan? What can you expect? I’ll try to add some content here soon, maybe cover some of my adventures with daily driving mobile Linux and how this site is run, since there are some surprises here!

I also need to clean some things up and make them look and work the way I intended.

Thanks for reading anyway! Awooooooooo~