After yesterday’s Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I’ve been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don’t really have an answer to. I guess it’s my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But “just so” changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It’s fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still....
Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo? I have.
I don’t need a new blogging platform, but if I did, I’d certainly be looking at Prose.sh. It’s blogging via sftp and rsync, which sounds awesome.
It’s possible that no one will ever see this post. I’m writing a Hugo-formatted markdown file in Emacs. This means it will be published to a defunct copy of my blog1 Unless of course I decide to bring it back as baty.net. If that happens, then 👋! ↩︎
⚠️ This blog is no longer running Kirby, but I left this here just in case. I’ve recently whittled my servers at DigitalOcean down to a single 2GB instance running Caddy. When I started playing with Kirby, I tried getting it running there, but had issues with php-fpm and Caddy not playing well together, so I spun up a hosted instance at (link: https://fortrabbit.com/ text: Fortrabbit). Running Kirby doesn’t require a database or anything fancy, just a web server and PHP, and it bugged me that I couldn’t get it working, so yesterday I tried again, and finally figured it out....
The Kirby experiment has been fun, but I’m not sure I’ll finish anything useful.
How to fix URLs in RSS feeds when using relative paths in page bundles in Hugo
Blogging options. Where I’ve landed.
As much as I love Tinderbox, I’m wondering if it will continue to make sense long-term as a blogging engine. I get along great with most of Tinderbox’s features, but export is one that has eluded me for going on 20 years. I can muddle my way through, but it’s always a challenge. This blog’s export templates have become complex enough that I don’t want to touch anything, for fear of breaking something....
The notebooks I’m actively using right now. Seriously. We all know that I have too many blogs. What’s less obvious is that I use too many different notebooks. Here’s what’s currently in rotation: A yellow legal pad. It’s nice to just throw stuff on the top page without thinking. Leuchtturm 1917 A5 Notebook (lined). This is my sort-of bullet journal. I keep lists and notes here, mostly. Hobonichi Techo. This is my calendar/planner....
I needed a change, so I brought the Papermod theme back.
So yeah, I’ve been putting Daily Notes at that other blog.
What’s up with RudimentaryLathe?
I have been wondering if the benefits of using ox-hugo just so I can write posts using Org-mode format is worth the extra layer of abstraction. I prefer Org-mode to Markdown, but Markdown is fine. In fact, Markdown-mode makes editing Markdown in Emacs quite pleasant. Ox-hugo is a great package, but increasingly seemed like a clever but unnecessary abstraction. One of its best features is that it makes creating new posts super easy....
Edward Snowden quote. Ox-hugo. Featured images and the Congo theme.
A new Hugo theme
For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace. The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago: Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought....
Daily vs separate posts?
I love Blot. It’s just right. But you know how sometimes you just want everything on your own server where you can touch it? Where you have access to the server redirects and access logs and everything? That’s what happened to me this weekend, so I’m once again publishing using Hugo and hosting on my DigitalOcean VPS with Caddy. Another factor driving the switch was wanting to use ox-hugo for writing posts....
I restarted my Micro.blog this morning. I was feeling lonely all by myself here at baty.net, so I thought I’d revisit some old friends. I expect this will affect the types of things I post here in my daily notes, but I don’t know in what way, yet. Micro.blog is a great blogging service, and I’ve been using it almost continually since the original Kickstarter campaign. I sometimes put the account on pause when I’m feeling Subscription Fatigue or when I’m suddenly all into some new platform or if I just don’t feel like sharing quite so much on social networks....