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First Post

··737 words·4 mins
Tech How-To Experience Web
Author
Moulting Penguin

I don’t know why I suddenly got the urge to set up the website. I had been planning for a looong time to create a blog management package. Maybe someday I’ll actually do that. But I realized I hadn’t done it in literally over a decade. I had always planned to use some sort of templating system (probably Perl based), and, really, all I wanted was to integrate a web-based editor. The spouse used Thingamablog for a while, and that worked, but it wasn’t really polished, and is now dormant.

My requirements are a need to self-host. I self host most of the things I use, and I don’t use (many) things I can’t self-host. Someday I’ll do a post about self-hosting, but suffice to say I just got a bug up my ass and decided there had to be SOME sort of tool I could use to generate a site and publish it on my own hardware.

I started by looking at a few blogs from well known OpenBSD developers. Then checked with pretty much any OpenBSD “compatible” blog software.

I finally narrowed it down to a couple of options, and Hugo seemed like a reasonable way to go.

As with most things, a few commands later, I had a functioning web site on my computer (while I want to publish to my OpenBSD server, I also want to just use my Mac for reviewing the site – so I’m pretty happy that Hugo (written in Go) is pretty easy to set up on a Mac.

But the devil is in the details, of course. I decided I wanted a theme. You gotta have a THEME! Another night later, I had a theme (Hugo Liftoff). Two more nights later, I’m actually starting to write this. Along the way I set up an initial “quickstart” site that Hugo recommends, then set up another one using Hugo Liftoff’s “exampleSite”, and finally created this one. We’ll see if it makes it to the public web server.

I’m still kinda fighting with the theme and/or Hugo. Since I’m not interested in using, well, pretty much anything people seem to want to use (no social media, I don’t “host” with a “provider”, etc), and my desire to keep things simple means avoiding PIP (Python) and NPM (JavaScript) (because I don’t want to install a whole new set of packages just for a web site), I did a lot of configuration changes to turn off as much as I could.

And STILL the HTML files that are generated have all sorts of twittercards, opengraph, structured-data, and what have you SEO crap I just would prefer was excised. Now I know why some of the themes had “No SEO” or “No Trackers” in their description. :-)

For editing, I’m an emacs user. It’s not that I don’t like vi (yeah, “vi”, not “nvi”, not “vim”, just vi). In truth I can’t stand IDEs with all the flashing and popping up of windows. I’ve been using emacs since the days of using undump to create an emacs executable on a Vax 785. I used to do a lot of System Administration work on Suns. I had to use vi until I was able to compile emacs on the systems. I learned a lot of vi. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I realized the Mac doesn’t have ispell, so, hay, maybe I can use this VS Code thing for something limited like editing Markdown. It doesn’t have built-in spell check. Yeah, fancy IDEs. A framework and 10-billion plugins and extensions. There are like over 100 emacs “emulators” or “keybindings” alone! So back to emacs, and just installing aspell. At least I can use flyspell now (which I’m still learning – two things I don’t have in a terminal window: Mouse support and the ability to do most Control-<punctuation>. Grrr. Had to remap keys for comments because I couldn’t use Control-; on the mac. Flyspell uses Control-.. Guess I’ll be remapping that key eventually.).

Anyway, here it is. A more-or-less functioning site, and this is my first post (after the main page, and the about page).

(Heh. Working on getting this post ready for publishing, I found out Escape Control-I works for Controll-. (flyspell-auto-correct-word). And more importantly, Escape $ is a better way to find how to correct a word (since “auto-correct” is, as we all know, a ducking mess). Anyway, it’s working well I think.)