Switching to static blog

Long time ago, I started writing a blog. Nowadays it is kinda old fashion. People just watch TicTok at best. Nobody reads anymore.

I also write less and less. Kinda because it is hard to find the time and hard to finish. I have few articles that I haven’t finished in my old Wordpress instance just lying around. I just can’t get around to finish them. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a time in front of of computer. When I’m in front of computer, I have a ton of work that I need to do and finishing article and publishing it is quite down the list.

Also I don’t have time to maintain the blog. I was bad at responding to comments, but what is kinda worrying me is that I no longer update it, check what is new and such. Luckily Wordpress takes care of itself, but it is also kinda heavy weight for what I need. So I decided to give a static blog a try.

I picked Hugo

My criteria for a new blogging platform were that I need something simple. Something to produce static website that understands Asciidoc and has more features than just rendering Asciidoc. Also slight preference to avoid anything Python based, but that is for different story.

I tried Pelikan, Jekkyl and few others, but in the end I found Hugo most easy to understand and get going. So I’m switching and probably breaking a lot of old links. I used Wordpess to Hugo Exporter and most articles looks almost fine. My pictures are not there as they were converted to unsafe HTML, but I’ll deal with that later and most of them was just for illustration purposes anyway.

My old articles were converted to MarkDown. I can live with that. It is nowadays more popular, personally I blame GitHub for that, but that’s fine, I can still read and update a little bit old articles, but the important fact for me is that I can write new ones in AsciiDoc. And if I ever change the rendering engine again, the switch should be pretty easy.

As a theme I chosen Pure Theme for Hugo and did some modifications to suite my needs more. And that is what you can see now. Hope you like it.

For the comments, I decided to ignore them and not to pick any solution. As mentioned earlier, I tend to overlook them anyway, so I’ll get comments via Twitter, Facebook or other social media that I don’t follow that much either.

Regarding deployment, I’m thinking about some CI on top of either GitHub or to revive my GitLab account as nowadays, I find GitLab UI and feature set more appealing. But I’ll start by uploading manually and luckily for me, I do own two similar domains. I have both hrusecky.net and hrusecky.cz, my blog was primarily on hrusecky.net where I can let Wordpress live a little longer and I’ll put a new one based on Hugo to hrusecky.cz and play there with it. Once I find the result good enough, I’ll drop the old Wordpress instance and redirect the domain.

Let’s see if this will get me writing again. I believe it will, at least for a short period of time as I’ll be playing with new toy :-)