How is this built and what needs to be done

Posted on Feb 23, 2024

Premisses

I’m using Hugo to build this. It’s stored in a gitHub repo and with a submodule it links to another repo, where the site public content is generated into, to be served thanks to GitHub Pages.

The reason I’m using Hugo and not Jekyll is mostly because how much I hate installing Ruby in my macbook. That was the main reason. I’ve used Jekyll before and I liked it. The template language is so much easier than the one used in Hugo, but the simplicity of installing Hugo plus the auto-updated local server made me chose Hugo hands down.

So far all is done manually, and I need my own laptop to write, generate and push the changes.

I don’t like this workflow.

Not only are too manual steps involved, is too clunky and Pages takes some time to update - and doesn’t seem to update all at once, sometimes I get some inconstencies.

I will later create a GitHub Action to automate generation and publishing and re-evaluate this issue of the eventual consistency.

The theme I’m using is Archie which is quite simple and easy to read. I made some modifications to it and will continue to do that. For now I just overwrite some of the templates. If I change more stuff maybe I should just fork it or so, but for now I didn’t change or want to change enough to justify that. So a bit thanks to Athul for this template.

Everything is written in Markdown and I’m using VSCodium to write it - I would like to use Obsidian, since it’s my favorite note taking application, but to also edit the HTML of the theme, using git, etc, VSCodium just makes it easier.

I’ve divided the content types into:

  1. posts, like blog posts, small and chronologically served. See the about page for why I want these
  2. phosts, which are posts with a single picture, to share my photos
  3. collections. In bullet journaling, “collections” are a way to organize related information or tasks that fall outside of the usual daily, weekly, or monthly logs. They serve as a dedicated space for tracking, planning, or logging specific aspects of your life, interests, or projects. However, I need a collection to be more than just that. But I don’t want to go as far as to distinguish collection from essay… not just now. Maybe in the future

Big Things To Do

  • The (blog) posts are too much to the center. I don’t have a way to put the relevance into collections. I need to figure out how to give relevance to collections and how to navigate through them.
  • also I want to have a good cross-reference, but not sure if adding back-references to each collection is a good idea, and how can tags play a role here. I need to get some inspiration else where.
  • navigation navigation navigation
  • eventually I would like to write the content with Obsidian and use it’s link structure here, but maybe that’s aiming to high - but I’m now dividing my attention between to batches of knowledge; this one here and my notes in Obsidian…. but are these two worlds connected or we want to prevent them from colliding?

Small Things To Do

  • List collections alphabetically, not chronologically.
  • Improve writing and deployment workflow
    • I want to write anywhere, with a web browser, e.g. Dillinger or StackEdit. Both can connect to GitHub, so I could commit and trigger the deploy.
    • work in the GitHub Action to have this published automatically.
  • I like the small icon leading when listing phosts. Find more icons for other type of content listed. These are the small things that are as the rug that really ties a room together.
  • Add a search box like in https://jekyll-garden.github.io/notes?
  • make hiearchichal tags or a better taxonomy for the post.
  • define a standard on how to name the posts - use date? always have a slug?
  • also define a standard for the slugs