The New Design#

I was originally going to write my own static website generator designed specifically for RetroInterlace, but at some point I decided that if I was ever going to get the new site up and running, that I need to just deploy something.

So I decided to settle on Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. It does everything I need it to do and though I don’t fully understand how it works yet, it does everything I want it to do at the moment. Though I have deviated in terms of aesthetics just a little bit, I do believe that my site is still accessible enough for my liking.

Why go through with this?#

My site generation scripts were working fine, but when I switched to Alpine Linux, the stoneground engine was suddenly having all sorts of problems that I decided that I did not want to fix. When I was using OpenBSD, I didn’t realize just how OpenBSD centric my site generation scripts were. It didn’t matter at the time since I never thought I’d move away from that particular operating system.

But on Alpine Linux, everything went awry very quickly. It currently sits broken on my SSD. So instead of fixing that mess, I decided to migrate to something else.

Hugo is greater than anything I could have come up with.#

Hugo is basically a platform for converting Markdown to HTML. My static site generator would have been a web of JSON configuration files that would have required me to manually define each page, each article, etc. But Hugo makes this much easier. Any markdown file in the “content directory” becomes part of the website, I can put articles in the “content/posts” directory and with a few lines of configuraiton at the top of the file, I can define everything I need to publish it.

It makes static site generation for RetroInterlace super easy. Plus with themes, I can define the look and feel of my website by gluing HTML modules together, just like the old stoneground engine. Though I’ve opted to use someone else’s theme at the moment.

Everything I was looking for was right under my nose the whole time#

I was aware of Hugo, even as I started to write my own site generator. But I wasn’t really interested in it at the time. As I knew I could generate my own website without extra dependencies. But now, I’m not sure I could give it up except for very simple websites.

I am not a professional web developer.#

Nor do I ever want to be. All I really want is to convey what I need to in a commonly accessible format. I could write books, or make videos, or record audiobooks or whatever. But I’d still need the Internet to distribute them in this day and age, and I’d want to have my own space to distribute them. Might as well just make a website.