My Hugo installation is up and running! Well, locally anyway, it’s nowhere online. Am now learning how to use it. How fun! I would happily spend my life creating funky little archival websites/blogs of weird little niche subjects.
@hollie cool. When you start with it you somehow want to use it for everything :-) I also need to stop myself constantly from doing so.
@hollie Tinkering with little archival websites and blogs is a ton of fun! At least half the fun of (micro)blogging tbh.
@hollie Oh yay! I'm regularly surprised by just how much you can do with Hugo. Definitely lots to explore 😊
@hollie I introduce my students to both Hugo and WordPress in one of my classes. They overwhelmingly prefer WP, but I always hope some will come away with a secret love for Hugo.
@spgreenhalgh Oh interesting! What types of classes are you teaching that you're introducing WP and Hugo? I understand why WP is so popular, but I feel like if there were a truly beginner (as in, never coded, never wrote html or css) way to introduce Hugo, people would be making digital gardens all over the place.
@sherif I think you're right! Now that I'm understanding how to install and use Hugo, I feel like I'm going to get (very happily) obsessed! Using markdown is so easy, and you can organize files so much easier than you can with WordPress, on and on....
@V_ Yeah once I got the first one running I immediately thought of reasons to create a half dozen others! Oh dear....
@hollie It's a class on content management systems. I don't know that Hugo "counts" as a CMS, but it's a better, safer sandbox for some technical CMS concepts than WordPress. Really big learning curve, though, so I get why my students grumble!
@hollie Yeah! I've personally been using Jekyll but I think Hugo is fairly similar in its reliance on Markdown files and then letting you create standalone page and play around with templating and stuff? For what it's worth and in case you're still researching options for putting your Hugo site(s) online, I found Netlify to be the nicest option so far and I use it for a bunch of sites. They have free tiers that include support for custom domains, and you can connect it to Github so that it automatically updates your site when you push a commit to a branch.
@hollie I love Hugo and Hugo templating (well, I have many favorited to play with). Only thing I don't like is publishing workflow - but I am always running some fun project locally 😂
@amit Oh hello! In a neat bit of synchronicity I was just reading about your new theme and then came to my blog and spotted your comment! I was rediscovering RSS tonight after a friend suggested I downloaded NetNewsWire. It came pre-loaded with @manton’s feed, and I read his post about Anitole, which looks like a beautiful theme. I’m going to try it out tomorrow! :)
@sherif Yeah I hear great things about Netlify! Have you found Jekyll to be pretty easy to use? I'm struggling a bit with Hugo right now, but I'm not a coder so a lot of the terms are Greek to me. :)
@hollie I knew very little about Hugo, but from a cursory look at their website it looks pretty similar to Jekyll in terms of being command-line driven. Jekyll has a learning curve but once you get used to it it's pretty flexible and powerful (I imagine same might be said about Hugo). I'd stick with Hugo if you're already learning it; Jekyll's future/development looks a little uncertain :( Btw I love working with people on stuff like this, so if you'd like I'd be happy to chat more and walk through some stuff!
@sherif I would love the help, thank you so much! I really like what I see Hugo doing, I just don't know how to get it to do those things. :)
@pimoore @hollie Yeah that's what I heard too. Although given how many GitHub pages and sites are running on it today, I always assumed some magic intervention would happen sooner or later and it would get picked up again just so GitHub wouldn't have to go through the pain of migrating all its users to something else.
@hollie I'll say that for Jekyll, after tinkering a little bit with a site built with the default theme, it helped me a lot to start another site with little or no theme and compare the two in terms of code and files, to figure out which parts did what. If that's an option for Hugo I recommend it.
(side thought/question: I wonder if there was ever discussion about Micro.blog getting some kind of community (a Discord or something? a section in the help forums?) to discuss questions on building and designing a site with Hugo. It feels different from the developers category cc: @jean)
@pimoore @sherif What, where did you hear that? 😊 The latest version of Jekyll, 4.3.0, was released just 5 days ago. And the release notes mention the roadmap to 5.0.
@sod @pimoore You're right, there's been some activity lately. You can see there was a dry spell for a while though. I think that made people worry. That, and a few devs leaving within a short duration. I think there might be just one active maintainer right now (?)
@sherif I thought that there was a default theme, but for some reason when I installed Hugo it didn't seem to have one? I'm going to try this again with a test site (I do love me a good subdomain) and see what I was missing about that. That's a really good idea.
I would LOVE a community (Discord or otherwise) that discussed building a Hugo site. That would be so helpful! If @jean sees this, add my vote! :)
@hollie This is a really good idea for a forum. I’m always on the lookout for ways to be more welcoming to new users and to people who aren’t into spending time on blog tech for fun. Thanks.
@jean @holly I feel there's a need for better documentation on how to modify a micro∙blog hosted blog, in the spirit of homecomputers (User's Guide and Programmer's Reference Guide). The "user's guide" is already there, which is a huge help to non-technical users. I assume that was already a lot of work.
