TL;DR;

I’ve given Publii the boot and shifted this site to hugo. I myself got a gentler boot, being made redundant and so eyeing off what to do next.

2020, it’s been quite a year

OK so it’s actually 2024, but whilst migrating this site to Hugo I noticed I haven’t written anything for the last four years or so.

It isn’t much of an excuse for the 2020 and 2021, but from 2022 I’ve been out of the classroom, working at a Digital Technologies EdTech platform. As such most of the interesting stuff I worked on was either internal, and thus not really relevant to write about, or external, and published as a course or delivered as part of a professional development session, and so I didn’t really feel like it was something to write about on my personal site. I know that sort of excuse doesn’t hold much water for lots of people who write about internal work topics all the time, but it feels right to me.

Now that I have some more time on my hands, it felt like the right time to kick the ol’ blog back into service, so here we are.

Markdown

Working at Grok I was head down in Markdown, git, and Python most of the time and frankly it gave me a much better appreciation for just writing words and not faffing around with buttons and whatnot for formatting. Publii had also been annoying me even when I was writing a bit more (if 4 posts over the duration of 2020 is “a bit”) because it’s hard writing things when you’re having to figure out if you’ve installed the app on the computer you want to use, checking if the database file has synced over etc.

Hugo

There are a lot of static site generators out there to choose between, and I’m sure you can find nice things that have been written about all of them. I chose Hugo, probably because that was the tool I’d most recently read nice things about. So I wrote some quick and dirty Python to extract all the slugs and publishing dates from my Publii sqlite database file to stick into text file frontmatter, and got converting.

Documentation

I found for general purpose “how do I get going” topics, the Hugo documentation was actually not that great. Probably not helped by half of the configuration being of the theme you choose (this uses hugo PaperMod) and the site generation itself, meaning some topics were on the official Hugo site, some where in any docs for the theme, and all of it was polluted by a mishmash of questions in some forum somewhere that may or may not relate to some other specific theme.

On the bright side, everything is just Markdown now, so the switching cost to another static site generator is pretty low.

Onwards!

Anyhow, now I have a much more maintanable site, a list of things I might-possibly-maybe write about, and a huge stack of books and bookmarked sites from the last few years to look at (and hopefully find something that someone will pay me for in the meantime)!