Broken FrontMatter Extension

Reading Time: 2 minutes
For two days now FrontMatter has been slightly broken. When I want to create new posts via the interface it refuses, so I have to copy and paste the front matter info from the previous day, and add it to a new markdown document. The operation is quick and easy but it’s a shame not to have the tool working as well as it could.

Every Hugo post has a title, a description, the date, preview, draft status, tags, and categories. With the FrontMatter extension all of this is generated automatically. For two or three days when I try to create a new page this isn’t generated, hence doing it manually.

In practice this is an opportunity to move towards a lighter tool. I could revert to using VIM and work towards being faster with this solution, or I could experiment with using emacs.

With both of these solutions I could use a Pi for blogging, rather than a laptop or desktop. I could live in terminal, rather than use Ubuntu and MacOS. I tried it before, and eventually decided to revert to having a simplified workflow.

Debugging

I tried deactivating the plugin. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it. I tried updating the system and packages. I also tried turning it off and on again, without success. The last thing to try is to clean install VS code and see if that helps.

This could also be the opportunity to get a metaphorical leaf blower and move previous posts towards the blog archive, but I don’t want to do that yet. I want to keep the history as it is.

The Side Track

A few months agoo I was trying to export my blog from WordPress to Ghost but it always timed out so that I only had a partial import of my current blog. I was thinking of playing with vibe coding to create a tool to convert the XML file to something ghost friendly. I haven’t got around to it.

Of course, because of age I know that with a google search I can find tools prepared by others that might achive what I want. A tool like MD2Ghost might work well.

And Finally

When a workflow breaks we can spend time fixing it, but we can also think laterally and learn about tools that are new to us. I enjoy having the Hugo static blog and the WordPress dynamic blog but I am curious about experimenting with ghost, to learn about a new blogging solution.