When I decided to revive this blog a while ago, I decided on … Jekyll, actually. Instead of installing Perl, PHP, or other scripts on my hosting provider, I could generate static HTML and upload it. I wouldn’t blog much, I figured. And knowing me, each entry would be the length of a term paper. It would give me time to reread and polish each post before releasing it out into the world, a thing discouraged by sites like G+, Facebook, and ugh Twitter.
Then someone on G+ (of course) insisted hugo was fast. Really fast. So fast. And better than Jekyll, which was slow and not as fast. So I crumbled. At first hugo was indeed faster, and did what I wanted it to do. Then the problems began:
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Hugo’s Markdown processor works subtly differently from Maruku (now obsolete, I guess), kramdown, or (from very limited experience) discount. For one thing I can’t seem to create bullet lists in which a list item is more than one paragraph. I can’t replace hugo’s though, because hugo is a single executable.
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As of hugo 0.55.5, the version I’m using now, the Ananke template – suggested for newbies – throws errors:
WARN 2019/09/16 22:44:14 Page’s
.Hugo
is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use the globalhugo
function.WARN 2019/09/16 22:44:14 Page’s
.RSSLink
is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use the Output Format’s link, e.g. something like:{{ with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}{{ .RelPermalink }}{{ end }}.
WARN 2019/09/16 22:44:14 Page’s
.URL
is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use.Permalink
or.RelPermalink
. If what you want is the front matter URL value, use.Params.url
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hugo has a “server” mode that serves up pages and refreshes them when the source files change. Lately it’s been dying. Maybe it’s the template errors.
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“So switch templates, all right?” I just want to pontificate at the Web. For “fun”. I can think of better ways to spend my time than evaluating templates.
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But fine. Say I find a template that avoids deprecated APIs. There’s a “minimalist” one I’ve been looking at. But then I have to learn their template language to make it look like I want yet look like a real graphical designer made it.
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I know HTML, have done for decades, and I’m slowly learning CSS. I could almost just mock up what I want as a static page, write a little program in Ruby or Lua to convert my existing and future blogs into HTML sandwiched between appropriate headers and footers and write it into a directory. One of my minor programming projects, which admittedly I haven’t even started, is to generate “static wikis” from Markdown pages, starting with my old Instiki text.
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Somebody this weekend told me he looked at my site and couldn’t find a link to the archive of my old posts. Not to sound like my mom, but maybe he should look again. But that does bring up concerns about how customizable these templates are. Oh, I’m sure they have plenty of switches and options to augment their default behaviors, but again do I really want to learn them? Or do I just want to just write the HTML I want to see? I’m doing all this to please myself, not a committee of senior executives who don’t know what they want until you show them everything and then they decide they liked the second thing, no not that one, the other one that only they remember.
So … that felt good.
But it doesn’t solve my problems. Really my solutions are:
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Switch to the minimalist hugo theme, if it works better.
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Find another hugo theme that doesn’t throw errors and that I can live with.
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Give Jekyll a second look. First, really.
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Write my own scheme, maybe after I’ve gotten experience building the “statiki” suite.
Maybe I’ll sleep on it.