WordPress and WordPress engine are fighting at the moment. Mullenweg wants WP-Engine to pay its fair share, or contribute more developer hours to keep improving WordPress as a whole. To be more specific “a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.” source
“The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not.
I was using Day One to blog but I found the process slow and clunky. I then switched to writing blog posts with VIM and that sped me up by a lot. I then switched to Hugo and VIM. Now I use VS Code with Front Matter to generate the pages, and then wrote plenty of posts using VIM. Now I’m still using FrontMatter CMS but with VS Code without touching VIM.
Yesterday I was experimenting with the Static folder in Hugo. Hugo and other static site generators has a folder where you can usually put content that you don’t want to have changed. You can add php, css, js and more. By making this an option it is possible to have your blog as markdown files that are updated and published every time you make changes while other files remain intact.
Yesterday I had no inspiration. In the end I did write about something but only after hours of staring at a hypothetical blank page. When I did start writing I used Frontmatter to generate the page but I forgot to open terminal and write the blog post using VIM. I used VSCode and Markdown. Whilst this might sound ordinary to most I did this because I like writing blog posts with VIM as it gets me to learn, over time, how to use it, automatically, rather than by struggling.
For weeks, or even months, by now I have been playing/experimenting with Hugo, 11ty and other solutions. I really like that with Hugo I can use FrontMatter as a CMS to create new posts, add the appropriate meta data, and keep track of what is published and what is in draft form. It allows me to create posts with the right metadata in seconds, rather than having to write the date, time, draft status and more by hand.
I like blogging with Hugo. I like writing my daily article in VIM and then exporting it to WordPress, before publishing it both with Hugo and WordPress. The build time for this build was 14 seconds but it can take up to 20 seconds. Although this i slow this isn’t the bottle neck.
New Files and Hugo Every time you create a blog post, and every time you use a keyword that’s tag page has to be regenerated.
For two days I have been trying to understand how to use Jekyll, a Ruby version of Hugo. It is a Static website generator that is similar to Hugo but rather than being written in Go, it is written in Ruby. I find that it renders sites faster than Hugo, but that it has less assistance for creating pages, giving them layouts and the rest. That’s why I experimented with YQ
For those who want to use Hugo, but find post creation and management complicated there is a FrontMatter plugin that should help. This is a plugin that makes it easy to create new posts in the category of your choice. It automatically creates the title, description field, that you need to populate, date, preview, draft status, tags and categories. It displays each post as a block and you can see within seconds whether a post is published, or just a draft.
With Hugo you can generate entire websites within milliseconds if they’re small and seconds if they’re large. Within a very short amount of time thousands of pages are generated. If you went through and checked each page then this could take hours, or even weeks, depending on the size of the site. To save time Hugo does have a command to check for html in Markdown in seconds. The next step is to see the title of the markdown pages with an issue and fix them individually.
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.