As we came into the new year I gave some thought to changing the CMS behind this site from Hugo (its current static website generator) to something else. I’ve been on Hugo continuously now for 4 1/2 years. The alternatives I considered were WordPress, Joomla and Grav.
I migrated the site (sans photos) to each of those three platforms and tried my hand at changing themes and managing general site behaviour.
Around twelve months ago I posted about how I was migrating this blog back to Hugo. That migration lasted around 6 months at which time I switched to Grav. I had fiddled around with Grav in the very early says of this blog but had commenced with Hugo.
Just before Christmas 2019 there were some changes made to Hugo which meant the theme I was using1 broke and my site wouldn’t render properly. I tried to fix it - unsuccessfully. As a result I switched to Grav. It worked well for a time but there were occasional issues with the site - namely that the bigfoot footnotes would only render correctly around half the time, and sometimes the archives and tag/category clouds didn’t seem to be complete.
As I’ve written about previously, I’ve maintained1 a number of websites or blogs over the years. After some fiddling over the past few days I have finally copied/migrated posts from two previous blogs “adventures in suburbia” (2006-2008) and “inelegant sufficiency” (2010-2011) to this site. They have been set up with their own categories (Adventures in Suburbia and Inelegant Sufficiency) but their old tags or categories have been combined with the tags of the more recent content.
This blog began a little over two years ago. In that time it has been created/managed/manifested firstly by Hugo, then by Wordpress, then by HTMLy, and now back to Hugo.
I worked out that my first round with Hugo was 9 months (May 2017 to Feb 2018), then 7 months on Wordpress (Mar to Sep 2018) and 8 months in HTMLy (Oct 2018 to May 2019).
Why change? I have different thoughts about ease of use, aesthetics, flat file vs database and ease of access/update. I would prefer some flat file/text based system. I value ease of use. I want the blog to be pleasing to look at. I want the information I choose to be front and centre of the site. Each of those platforms has offered different measures of that criteria.
At work we have a website that uses Joomla. The site administrator has left the organisation so the site’s administration is falling to me. I haven’t had much to do with Joomla (or the work website) in the past. I had looked Joomla briefly (along with WordPress, Drupal, Hugo, Grav and Jekyll) last year when considering what sort of engine could best drive the great beast egeiro.net.
As a result, I’ve had to spend time installing/running/checking/modifying/learning Joomla over recent weeks. I’ve loaded it up on several computers locally and accessed it using XAMPP and/or WAMP. These applications run Apache, MySQL and PHP so that web applications can be installed and tested offline.
I really like the simplicity yet elegance of Anders Noren’s WordPress themes. Currently I’m using Hemingway. The only change I make is to show excerpts rather than full posts on the front and summary pages. This is easily done by editing the theme file directly. The change needed is to access Appearance – Editor in the admin panel, select file content.php and change line 65 (which may change) from
<?php the_content(); ?>
to
When I first began this blog in May 2017 I wanted to avoid heavy CMS’ like WordPress, Joomla etc. I instead wanted a flat file system and chose Hugo.
I still like the idea or the philosophy behind a flat file approach, but my setup meant I could only update posts from one machine. I think this was somewhat limiting so I reconsidered my platform. After fiddling with Joomla, I have instead gone for WordPress. I have had some limited experience with WordPress in the past with a church website so it was a shallow learning curve.
I’ve been running this site for a couple of months now and wanted to implement some form of footnoting.
When I write, I tend to include a lot of text in parentheses (just like this) as they indicate a side thought. An alternative way of rendering that side thought is via a footnote1
I’d come across a site also created in Hugo by But She’s a Girl which had quite elegant footnotes. I wanted something similar. BSAG pointed me in the direction of Bigfoot but while I was looking into that I came across references to littlefoot and barefoot which are a little more lightweight and/or vanilla.
After a bit of testing, fiddling and pondering I’ve decided to opt for Hugo as my CMS. It’s flat file, a single executable, multi-platform (which only needs to cover GNU-Linux and Windows in my stable), lightweight, well documented and has a swag of themes.
We’re ready to roll…
Over the years I’ve created and maintained a number of websites and/or blogs. The first was created in the free space offered by my then dial-up ISP. It was called “The Lounge Room” and comprised of a collection of anecdotes and stories I’d read. It was all hand-coded html.
My second site was another hand-coded html site called “Sandprints in my Mind”. It was my first attempt at what some might call a blog. It comprised some photographs and the odd book review. Because of the effort in maintaining it, it only lasted a few posts.
Welcome to egeiro.net. At the moment this is a greenfield website. The only real content exists in my head.