Goodbye Wordpress#

I am not a web developer. I have done some web development and web server administration in the past, but the state of the art has missed me by at least 2 generations. I used Wordpress for a number of years, but using their hosting keeps getting more and more limited, and the idea of hosting WP myself makes me kind of queasy. I never really learned how to do that much with WP much less how to secure it or administer it. So it’s best to return to my unix shell account days and use a static site.

Hello Caddy#

Using caddy as a webserver is bad ass. It does a bunch of things that I never figured out how to do, straight out of the box. Caddy can create SSL certificates automagically. The caddyfile takes a bit of time to get the hang of, but once you do, getting multiple name-based virtual hosts running on the same web server is a piece of cake.

Hugo, wat r u doing? Hugo stahp.#

Hugo on the other hand is a nightmare to make work without reading all the docs. Actually Hugo isn’t hard to get working, it’s Hugo themes that are hard to understand. Taking on learning git, markdown, Hugo and template design all at once has been a challenge. It’s hard to document your process on a blog while you are building the infrastructure for the blog. It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem.

The current challenge is finding a template that does what I want, being able to edit it and add pages with nothing disappearing, and then pushing the test site out to the webserver and having it look the same as it does on the local hugo test server. Right now it’s kind of a mystery why things disappear.

Also, it needs to be restated that I do not know what I am doing here. 25 years ago when the web was still young, anyone could make webpages and call themselves a web developer. But the game has changed significantly since those days. Today’s web development is a lot of gluing pieces of cloud things together with API’s. Not exactly in keeping with my self-hosting philosophy.

So, I know the site looks like hell right now, but the whole reason I am doing this is to start writing again. Messing with config files is cool, but it doesn’t really help my depression.

Other sites#

I am still figuring out the workflow for writing and publishing blogs. I have other sites for talking about phones and VOIP, amateur radio and outdoor adventures, and a new site dedicated to my work in the protest space and my journey to becoming a street medic.