After using Metalsmith as my previous blog engine I decided to move to Hugo.
I previously used Metalsmith for the large amount of flexibility and the fact I could easily write new additions to my site.
The downside is that it is time consuming to get right. I spent a bit of time on it, then somewhat stopped. I never got the theming fully finished, or RSS support integrated.
Hugo comes with everything fully configured out of the box.
For the past two or so years, I have been running my desktop computer dual booting Windows and Arch Linux. This has been a good solution for me, being able to use Windows for media consumption and the occasional game and also having a proper Linux operating system as a development environment. It’s occasionally frustrating having to reboot between systems, especially on weekends where I might swap between working and leisure multiple times.
I have been working on getting my Raspberry Pi up and running again.
In the past I have used it as a local fileserver on my network, a networked Time Machine/Time Capsule volume and BitTorrent sync client.
Every time I used it as a local server, it has been as a headless server attached to my router with a network cable and and a USB external hard drive.
The two main problems I have had with this in the past are:
Making a symbolic link I always forget the order of parameters.
ln -s TARGET_OF_SYMLINK WHERE_THE_SYMLINK_IS_STORED
For some reason I always get the two swapped around.
Having used GitHub pages in the past, I initially got this blog up and running on it pretty quickly. Over time though, I wanted to start hosting it myself, so I started the transition to AWS.
Domain + DNS The first stage was migrating my DNS from the free Namecheap servers to Route 53. This was pretty easy, mostly creating some hosting zones and then copy pasting some strings around.
Metalsmith is a simple little static site generator, which acts a lot like gulp, piping a series of input file through a series of transformations (which are provided by plugins), and then outputs a directory with the resulting site.
I ended up deciding to use Metalsmith due to it’s simple design, ease of getting started and the ability to eventually create whatever kind of site I want. I may end up revisiting the decision, but having all my posts in markdown files should make it fairly easy to transition between any other systems I may want to play with in the future.
So, whilst working through my Metalsmith setup, I was faced with the choice of how to structure my permalinks.
The example given in the docs shows the of of just /postName, which works, but gives me a vague concern about having post title conflicts.
In the past I had also seen and used /YYYY/MM/DD/postName.
Getting my OCD on I decided to research the topic a little and see what the current best practices are.
So, given that I want to use GitHub Pages (for now), I have been looking into static site generators.
In the past I have used Jekyll/Octopress, but they felt a little too cumbersome to me. From memory, they were relatively slow to generate a site and (Octopress at least) involved you cloning a repository to get started, which left your git history for the site full of non-content commits.
Starting over I had a quick think about the main things that would be important to me in terms of choosing a static site generator.
Hello world!
I just re-discovered that I had this domain and already had it hooked up to GitHub pages.
Deciding to put it to somewhat better use, I am going to actually put it to a bit better use and write up some content about projects I am working on, etc.