Since I moved my blog over to Hugo, I’ve been wanting to do a little series of posts about various aspects of my set-up, just in case they help anyone else thinking of doing the same. This first post is about how I’ve enabled Webmentions, an important building block of the IndieWeb. As you might notice, my blog posts don’t have conventional comment forms underneath them. Instead, …
As I mentioned in my post about Gemini, mine is a lightweight website for the most part; it’s built with a static site generator, I don’t use any heavy Javascript includes, and there are certainly no ads or trackers. The main exception I mentioned then was images: these were, by far, the major thing blowing out the filesizes (and loading times) of my pages and I knew there were …
An eight-year-old blog post on many points of internationalisation developers screw up, including date formats, timezones, and the 20+ currencies all called dollars. Why are so many sites so ambiguous? Most of the post is still relevant today.
When I first got started on Micro.blog, one thing I wasn’t satisfied with was that my long posts appeared in full on my blog’s homepage. Really, I wanted to give people a way to quickly check out what I’d recently posted, and having to scroll the whole way through long entries that may not have interested them (considering I blog about an eclectic mix of things) wasn’t …
Today I started teaching myself how to use Hugo! The Quick Start guide on the official site is indeed a good quick start, but if anyone else needed a more detailed guide to how to actually get up and running, I can recommend Make a Hugo blog from scratch.
After two and a half weeks running my own blog at this subdomain, I feel energised to start making a static site to go alongside it at the root domain ☺️ At first I was looking into Hugo, but the learning curve seems a little high and I feel like it might be overkill for what I want. So instead, I’ve installed MAMP to my laptop so I can work on a basic static site locally (with PHP includes for page layouts, as I used to do back in the day) and upload it once it reaches a satisfactory point.
For me, there are a lot of advantages to a static site: it should be a lot lighter and more performant than having a whole CMS for just a personal site; it allows me a lot more flexibility and precision for each page (because while I know CMS templates can technically do that, I’m just better with HTML/CSS/very basic PHP); and perhaps most importantly, if life gets too busy and I don’t have the time to actively work on the site for a while, nothing should break on me 😂 When I had blogs in the past, I often had problems with spam or software updates breaking my themes if I had to leave them unattended, and considering it was just a hobby that did sometimes happen… I’m a big fan of solutions that mean I no longer need to worry about this!
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.