Colza field with the Jura in the background, looking dark due to thick clouds

Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo is tempting because I don’t need an entire CMS for what I’m doing. What I need is a centralised system that checks for tags, titles and the theme, and updates the navigation as I add new pages. You don’t need a CMS for that.

The Good Old Days

If you go through the meta data for many of my static pages you will see that they were created with dreamweaver, frontpage 2000 and other solutions. The aim of these was to create an application that would prepare the html and navigation for pages, so we could concentrate on content creation. This was before the age of the CMS.

A short Learning Curve

If you want to create a simple blog, without changing much the learning curve for WordPress and Hugo is short, compared to what is required for Laravel, Angular and other solutions. You create content and there are tools that will take care of almost everything else.

With Hugo and WordPress you can, theoretically, start creating content and sharing it within minutes, or even seconds, depending on how many times you have set things up before.

HTML or Markdown

With Hugo if you want to create a simple page you can use markdown and save a lot of time and effort. You focus on headings, images, lists and hyperlinks. If you want to have more flexibility you can generate an HTML page, and with this you can do anything you want, and have the experience, to do.

  • hugo new blogs/big-timber.html
  • hugo new posts/hugo-and-wordpress.md

A Huge Mess

I need to find a solution to a problem. I have a blog with thousands of articles so I have thousands of markdown pages in a single directory. I considered using the creation date with year-m-d-article-title.md but if I do this then Hugo will use that as the headline for new blog posts. I would need to edit the Title of new posts, to remove the date information. For the public folder, once the blog is exported the files are tidy.

Thousands of Files and Directories

Hugo likes to create a folder and file for every single page. The result is that every page has its own folder. That’s fine, when everything is working well, but chaotic every time you make changes. At the moment of writing every change generates 6000 files and folders. That’s 10-20 seconds per export, and this doesn’t include the upload time.

Minor Changes With A Big Cost

When you’re using a CMS like wordpress changing a theme takes seconds. You find a theme, apply it, and a few seconds later you’re ready to role. With Hugo if you change the theme you need to regenerate and then reupload the website in its entirety. Small changes become big changes. Having said this, with a static website, managed by hand, rather than Hugo, this would take hours, rather than seconds.

Very Fast, Flexible

I see that Hugo is fast and flexible. It provides the organisational features of a CMS with the flexibility of HTML pages, when that is desired. This makes it easy to circumvent the limitations that are imposed by markdown, for those that want to embed videos or other features into a specific web page or blog post.

And Finally

Hugo requires no back end. Anywhere that you can upload html, can display a Hugo website, or individual pages. You have the ability to tell Hugo where the files will be on a server, so that links are built to play nicely. Both the static part of my website, and the blog may soon run via Hugo.

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Laravel and Context

Laravel and Context

Byrichard

There is value in studying Laravel and context. By this I mean that over a year ago I wanted to study Angular but after feeling lost in Javascript I decided to take a step back, to study JavaScript. I studied two or more courses over a period of months. I could have followed a single course and claimed that I knew and understood JavaScript but that would have been misleading.


The value in studying two, three or more courses is that each teacher, and each course takes a different approach, and each approach fills in gaps that are left open by others. By studying three or more courses on JavaScript I gained a better contextual understanding of what JavaScript can do, as well as how it works.


Eventually I did return to JavaScript but I encountered another challenge. I don’t understand the error messages yet, because I haven’t come across them. That’s when I decided to circle around and study PHP from the ground up and that’s where I found comfort. I like PHP because errors are clear. They are usually literal. There is an error at this line and it’s easy to debug.


After becoming more confident with PHP I started to rework my personal website so that pages went from being basic html pages that were decades old, with css added recently, they were php pages. Eventually I felt confident enough to step into the world or Laravel.


I began by experimenting with one laravel tutorial on the laravel website, before following the tutorial but changing certain names. It worked well. I was able to create website sections and update content and more. I did get stuck when I wanted to make content visible to non logged in users.


That’s when I decided to follow a course. The course is “Let’s Learn Laravel” by Brad Schiff. It is a comprehensive course, over fourteen and a half hours that teaches you how to create pages, users, models, use middleware, policies, how to create chat rooms and more. On the topic of chat rooms I find it interesting.


He often says “this is outside the scope of the course so I won’t go into the details” but I have already been into depth by following Vanilla JavaScript courses. I would struggle to write the code from scratch, but if I see the code in front of me then I do understand what it does, to some degree. On this specific topic he also points us to node.js packages that do most of the work for us.


The reason I follow Udemy coures, that I buy at 9.99 or 11USD, when they’re on sale, rather than follow hours of courses on YouTube is that they’re comprehensive. They also have to adhere to a certain standard. I also use Linkedin Learning for courses.


My website is decades old, and it has gone from html, to html with CSS, to static php. By learning to use Laravel it will become dynamic. It will serve to prove that I understand what I am doing. It will help to build up my confidence, and my portfolio.

Objectified – A Design Documentary Split Into Individual Interviews.

Byrichard

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design that has been divided into interviews with individuals about a diversity of designs, from the casing of the Mac Book Pro to chairs, a CD player that behaves like a fan and much more.


On Linkedin, this documentary has been cut up and split into chapters so that you can either watch the documentary in its entirety or you can watch it as video on demand with the designers you’re interested in or familiar with. It’s a contemporary implementation of the documentary genre because it assumes that you have five minutes at a time to devote to this documentary.


You also have the option of reading the transcript instead of watching the videos if desired. Some interviews are in French, German, Dutch, Japanese or English so you are not obliged to listen to an actor dubbing the interview or read the subtitles. You can simply lesson.


The reason for which I thought this documentary was blogworthy is that once you have watched the final edit version of the documentary you can watch the rushes. You can watch the interventions that were interesting but that was too long-winded or not compelling enough to make the final cut.


I like this. As an editor, we often work on videos and we rough cut to a video that’s three or four times longer than it should be and we listen, and we remove a phrase, and then another before we finally end up with the short version that is youtube or Instagram worthy. We feel that other sentences were interesting but because of limits with time and attention stay in the rushes bin.



In these clips we see the adjustments in shot size, we hear the person ramble and repeat themselves. We also see the video without cutaways or other embellishments. This lends a cinéma verité/direct cinema feel to the documentary. It’s easy to get half an hour to an hour’s worth of interview with each artist or designer and be forced to keep just the two most relevant minutes for the documentary.


Luckily with platforms like Linkedin Learning we can follow the course, i.e. Objectified, in this case, and call it a day, leaving the rest of the videos unwatched. We also have the option to expand and to learn more. I’m using Objectified as the example but there are plenty of topics and documentaries that would benefit from this approach to film making.


Plenty of Linkedin videos are of people reading from a prompter and you can see their eyes moving across the screen, and you can see that they’re pretending to be spontaneous rather than natural.


Documentaries, and Linkedin Learning are well suited, and more documentaries should make their way onto this platform.

Last Three Steps Before Handing In My Dissertation

Byrichard

Being at the stage I’m at, and having discussed the work with the tutor there are three things I must make sure to do before handing in the work.

The first task is uniformity. I need to go through two or three sections and make sure that I tie them into the overall structure of the dissertation work. It’s meant to flow from one section to another. That’s something I’ve got to work on.

The second thing I’ve got to work on one or two paragraphs, make sure that the information that I wrote down is comprehensive and there’s no so what question left in the air.

The final task is to make sure that I have a clear dissertation title and write the dissertation conclusion according to this. Once that’s done I’m pretty much done with this most major of assignments and it’s been a great learning curve. I think it’s been the best learning experience overall that I’ve had in University.

The Nicest Pi Setup Yet

The Nicest Pi Setup Yet

Byrichard

There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.

Over a few weeks I have experimented with installing Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS on several Pis and then added docker containers, and tried installing straight to the system. In the process I have iterated and iterated until I developed an effective work flow. Yesterday I spent an hour or two preparing an Ubuntu SD card, snap installing Nextcloud, and then docker, and then Photoprism, Immich, Home assistant and maybe one or two other apps. I also set photoprism to boot automatically at start up. When I tried to do the same with Immich it failed. In the end I settled for a shell script, thanks to Chat GPT help.

I kept a copy of the 48 commands I got to setup the system but ignored the trial and error part, for now. Ideally I should setup a script that can do this configuration automatically. I would install ubuntu, boot it up, and then run the shell script to install what I want automatically, so that a system is quick and easy to setup.

Centralised

Initially I had one Pi per service/server. This gave me the freedom to experiment with one service/server without destroying everything else. As I began to understand how the apps/services/servers work I was able to move them together on the same machine and have them run side by side. I go from needing several Pis with dedicated roles to a single Pi that can do it all, if I feel like centralising everything. Before I centralise everything I want to be able to migrate the logs and data from several apps to a central point.

I like that Home Assistant has weather data for several weeks. Part of the learning process is learning to move data between systems without losing their history.

And Finally

By installing a system, and then re-installing it over and over I learn with each iteration, and with each iteration I see something that could be improved so I improve it. Eventually I get a work flow that is fluid and does what I want with relative ease. I kept those 48 lines of commands so that when I do this again I can refer to my “notes” rather than several pages from two or three sites, and Chat GPT. That I managed to install Immich and Homestation counts as a success, because I had tried and failed to install both of them recently.

Of Blogging and Substacking

Of Blogging and Substacking

Byrichard

A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t. 


Substack Life


Substack went from being a newsletter to almost becoming a community of writers. I say “almost”, because for me to consider a community a community it has to behave like a community. It has to be a network of friends of friends, and it has to be about individuals connecting with other individuals, through their community. 


With Substack it went from “Wow, notes look great” to “My follower numbers have exploded”, “oh so have mine”, and that’s when I disengaged. People behaved the same way on Twitter and the community was degraded into a network of strangers following each other and fighting for attention. Within the space of hours the network that it could have become was degraded to a popularity contest. I have no interest in these. If I wanted to join one I could socialise in the physical world of bars and other places. 


What I don’t like about Substack, and social media in general, is that it’s about users creating content for the owners of the social network, and then making money off of our backs, without giving us anything in exchange. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other networks have all made this move. 


On Blogging


With tools like WordPress, among many others we have the freedom to generate content, and choose whether to pay for our own hosting, and manage our own websites and attempt to monetise them, or jump onto Wordpress.com and other solutions. and just create content for the pleasure of it. 


I mention pleasure, because with blogs we write because we have inspiration. Either we have done something that we want to share, or we have an opinion on something, that we want to get out of our minds, by putting it on screen, and then forgetting about it. 


I prefer to blog because although it could be e-mailed to someone it is usually just one post, in a timeline, among many others. People can look at it, think “this is dull and boring” and move on. With blogs there is no obligation to read any post. It’s all about whims. 


With Substack the opposite is true. You write a post, you e-mail it, and people have to swipe to it, keep it on screen until it’s marked as read, before moving on. 


I like e-mail for private conversations, but feel that newsletters et al would be better served by being blog posts that we can opt in to reading. or skip and ignore. 


And Finally


I prefer blogging to Substack Newsletter writing for two reasons. The first is that I want to write about anything, rather than on a specific theme. The second reason is that I don’t want to generate content that someone else will benefit from, more than I will. I don’t want to be used and exploited. With blogs I do not feel that way. With Substack I do., I went from being a person to a statistic within hours of Substack Notes being created. 

Learning and Consolidation
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Learning and Consolidation

Byrichard

Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there


As I followed two or more courses on the topic there was quite a bit of repetition. Another word for repetition is consolidation. By studying the same topics, taught by different people I consolidated my knowledge. I filled in the knowledge gaps and eventually I began to understand how the code works, even if I can’t write it from scratch yet.


The aim isn’t necessarily to be able to write a web app from scratch. The aim is to understand how all the elements work individually, as well as how they work together in an app.


Today for example in the Let’s Learn Laravel course I followed the lesson on form validation, with mention of Bcrypt and Node.js. This feels good, because I see how frameworks help to save time. For years I was happy to use WordPress as a user, because it works well as a blog and CMS. Now I have studied enough to build my own, although my greatest concern is safety. I want to migrate the static part of my website to Laravel, but I want to do so when I feel confident that it will not be hacked. I also want to do this without destroying the rest of the site in the process.


That’s where the current course comes in. I need help in understanding the process and the steps for setting up a project in Laravel, taking advantage of the tasks that it does for me. When the effort is ready I will deploy it to a web server and see how well it works.


One of the reasons to follow courses, even if they are filled with plenty of repetition, is to learn about concepts. I knew about include but I didn’t know about layout. By understanding layout you can prepare a template, where the elements that change are individual pages, and the layout does the rest, to keep the entire site looking the same. This will become my “portfolio”.

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