Moving to Hugo

I started this website around 2008 at wordpress.com. Later in 2012, I moved to Jekyll and started blogging on Markdown. I started using git to manage the code and host the website first on GitHub Pages and later on Netlify. Since then, I’ve slowly moved other projects from Jekyll to Hugo. I still have a few in the good old ruby tech, the biggest one, without any doubt, being the daily geospatial digest.

Anyways, I had some time on the Christmas vacation to explore the migration. On the other hand, a few weeks ago, I learned about the Gemini protocol to publish content focusing on privacy, simplicity, and text-first. This protocol clicked on my head immediately (that’s material for another post), and I wanted to explore how hard it would be to set up Hugo to publish both a website and a Gemini capsule from the same content. Gemini is a pretty new technology. It is a straightforward protocol and an even simpler text format (loosely based on Markdown). Thanks to Hugo’s remarkable flexibility, I learned quickly that generating both outputs from the same source is not trivial but doable.

Starting a Gemini capsule from zero is pretty easy, and there are already a few hosting service providers if you don’t want to set up your server, or you can even join a tilde if you wish to have a more profound jump into the small web. But I have my own domain and ten years of content that I still want to publish on the web under my terms, ideally without having to set up a dedicated server. At least for now.

I will leave the technical details for another occasion. For now, I will comment that I’m moving my website from being stored on Bitbucket and hosted by Netlify to being thoroughly and kindly held at sourcehut: a very simple forge that has all the components to keep, build, and publish both websites and capsules. It is not free, but the subscription is reasonable, and the forge itself is an open-source project.

I yet need to migrate the content between 2008 and 2010. But other than that, the website contains all the same content and sections from the old one, with the relevant change that I’m merging the monthly recaps (the now page) into the main blog; they will show up in the regular RSS feeds under the update category.

I haven’t written any CSS on this migration project. The Hugo theme was created from scratch and uses the picocss library with the default styles. I plan to tweak the default colors, fonts, and sizes at some point. Finally, depending on your system settings, you will also see the web in a dark or light theme.

What do you think? Will you consume my content from Gemini? Do you like this web design, or is it too austere for your taste? Given this is a personal website, is there anything you’d like me to improve? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

2023-01-16 Update: I’ve fully migrated to the top domain so all the content is served at jorgesanz.net