Ahoy! I have replaced the old blog, which was run by Ghost, with essentially the same blog run by Hugo. I setup the Ghost instance several years ago, and it was fine, but not quite what I wanted. Basically, when I want to write something (especially something technical) I really want to do it using VIM. Also, Ghost isn’t really customizable (it’s just a blog!), and I felt it might be nice to have an integrated website-blog thing. Finally, Ghost releases updates quite frequently and it seemed like everytime I sat down to write something, I would end up going through the rigmarole of upgrading to the latest version (which didn’t help me get above my “two posts a year” average).

I’ve worked with a static website generator before, a project called Middleman written in Ruby. Hugo is essentially that, but it has speed and a rich set of template helpers giving a greater flexibility to content design and organization. Besides, I figured it would be nice to learn something new and it doesn’t hurt that Hugo is written in my new fascination, Go (golang). One thing I missed from Middleman was good preprocessor integration. I use SASS for my CSS work, but it was easy enough to write a makefile target for converting my SASS files to CSS. I’ll probably do a watcher target using inotify for that soon, as it’s already becoming tedious. Alas, there is not a make target for giving you web design talent; As you can see, my web design aesthetic could easily be described as “brutalist”. I do hope to spend time on that at some point, and there’s some things with tags, post navigation, and RSS that I’ll eventually address. But, for now, it works!

The endgame for all this is more writing. I’ve spent much of the past year working on improving my programming practice and have lots of ideas and observations that if not useful to others, will at least be good practice for me to expound upon in longform. So expect more writing along those lines!

PS: The old posts were converted over and I’ve setup URL redirects from https://blog.uberbrodt.net to the relevant posts here. The upside of not writing much is that this was fairly trivial.