Into the Unknown

TL; DR: I’m in the process of migrating old posts from my three existing blogs into this blog. I’m also starting to write again.

I’ve been searching for a blogging platform that fits my needs for the better part of a decade. I started off on Blogger, now Blogspot, which worked, but was clunky. From there, I checked out a variety of other solutions, eventually settling on Ghost. Ghost wasn’t perfect, though, and I wanted a solution where I could write and publish straight from my computer. I tried out Wordpress, which integrates with Word, but writing posts in Word isn’t really where my heart is.

While pondering the problem recently, it occurred to me that what I really wanted was a repository of blog posts, probably written in markdown, that I could just git push and have a remote process publish the changes. I tried out Jekyll, and it worked, but I’m not a Ruby developer, and I struggled to get the Ruby gem-based themes working. Eventually, I moved on to Hugo, which is written in Go, and installs themes as git submodules.

So far, my experience with setup was less than ideal. While trying out different themes, I found out that each theme demands vastly different configuration settings and/or front matter. So, I decided to first cycle through themes and see if I could find one I liked before focusing on configuration. After much consideration, I went with casper3, which is similar to the default theme used by Ghost. I’ve tweaked it some, and will probably continue to tweak it more as I learn the templating system, which is based on Go.

As far as publishing goes, I’ve scripted the basic steps needed to generate the site and then sync it to my server. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do while I’m learning the process.

So, now I’m pulling in posts from my old blogs, selectively, and preparing to shut the old blogs down. I used a migration tool, ghostToHugo, to get the posts out of Ghost’s JSON export. The Ghost posts are, by far, the easiest ones to migrate, because they’re already in markdown.

Until next time, be excellent to each other…