Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.
The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better. I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service.
Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo is tempting because I don’t need an entire CMS for what I’m doing. What I need is a centralised system that checks for tags, titles and the theme, and updates the navigation as I add new pages. You don’t need a CMS for that.
The Good Old Days If you go through the meta data for many of my static pages you will see that they were created with dreamweaver, frontpage 2000 and other solutions.
Playing with AI and Learning to Keep It Simple, Silly Yesterday I was playing with AI in the evening and I asked it to help me write a function that would detect whether an array item was a photo or a video. I told the AI, this is a photo array item, and this is a video array item. I want the photo array item to display the img src code and for the video item to be displayed with video src code.
Converting This Blog To Hugo On Saturday I converted my blog from WordPress to Hugo as an experiment and it went quite well. I downloaded the xml file and then I converted that xml with blog2md to go from xml to md pages. A page was created for every single blog post. This took a while. I now have my blog both as static pages, and as a wordpress blog.
Today I want to discuss something different. I want to discuss using AI as a teacher, rather than as a tool to replace us. For a few days I have been playing with the Instagram json file that I got when I requested my archive. With this json file I thought about things to do, and in so doing asked chatGPT for help, and it provided answers.
Adapting the Questions
In theory WordPress is a fantastic tool to write a blog, without needing to learn to code. In practice I am tired of WordPress and I have been tired of WordPress ever since they started to use blocks, and ever since I noticed that it uses React. React and Meta
I know that PHP was developed by Facebook, and that we use it all the time, but I also know that React was developed by Facebook as it was morphing into Meta, the destroyer of the independent web.
For a few days I have been playing with Hugo with Markdown and HTML pages. It says that it is “the world’s fastest framework for building websites” and so far I do notice that it has a key strength that I like. Front Matter
That strength is that with small modifications you can take an existing static website and make it dynamic. Hugo requires that each page has Front Matter. Front matter is:
When looking at Codeberg as a European alternative to github I came across mentions of Pelican, a static blog generator. Yesterday I spent several hours setting it up and playing. Whilst playing with it I saw some opportunities. By default Pelican is designed to have one category per blog post. For small websites this is fine. It encourages people to focus on three to five topics, and ensure that each topic is clearly visible in the nav bar at the top of the page.
Most websites are simple. They have five to ten pages at most but usually a single page is enough. Most pages are about one specific thing, whether it’s a CV inspired page to find new clients or a simple page with a few products. Most are usually about a single topic.
This makes website maintenance and design simple, because one theme fits every page. My website is different. It has articles about the Romans, Geography, Environmental Studies, old student newspaper articles, Media studies pages and more.