I’m not gonna lie, I think this is kind of funny. I finally have what I’ve wanted for a long time and I can self host. But my workflow for posting here was all around pushing updates to Digital Ocean and it took me this long to set up things so that I could push them from here to the computer in the other room. Unreal, right?
I’ve been using the Blackburn theme for this site for a while. I’ve made some small changes and I’ve struggled a little to know where I should make those changes - in the theme or in the core of my site. Probably this struggle is more an issue of my getting my head around Hugo but it also comes from the fact that while separating content from how it is displayed is an awesome idea, it’s never as easy as it seems to completely keep the two apart all the time.
For years I ran a bog standard setup. I changed hosting companies a couple of times but it was all pretty much the same. Shared hosting that provided PHP and MySQL running Wordpress sites for the most part. I dabbled with Drupal and maybe some other CMS packages but that was about it.
Some time, I don’t know how long ago, I decided I wanted more flexibility. I wanted access to the OS and the ability to try out things outside whatever box the shared hosting put me in. I did some looking around and landed on Digital Ocean. I think I was drawn to them over the other options based primarily on 2 or 3 things.
I use sourcehut for version control and storing my code. That includes this blog.
My workflow until today was pretty simple. I make changes to the blog, commit and push those changes to the remote repo and then I would build the blog and use rsync to copy changes over to my host. I have everything set up to do this on the two main machines I use. It’s really pretty easy.
I’ve been thinking about setting up a new blog that didn’t depend on an RDBMS for a while. I tried out a number of options and struggled with Hugo, my choice for a bit. One of my big issues was getting something that looked the way I wanted.
There are lots of Hugo themes available. The problem was a combination of two things.
First Hugo is being developed and improved at a rapid pace. This is awesome. But it means that some themes that caught my eye didn’t really work well because they were a little old. Someone who really knows what they are doing could probably fix those issues quickly but that’s issue number two.
This is my first go at my own post and sorting my front matter.