Moving to hugo

Several years ago, back when I was posting to this site, I moved to nanoc. I’ve had my eye on hugo for quite some time, but back in the day, it didn’t have the capabilities to generate the site as it was setup.¹ Maybe it did, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Well, now things have progressed a bit, and I was able to generate the site with hugo without too much difficulty. The biggest challenge was the redesign; if I were a rich man, I would hire someone to do a design for the site. I apologize to anyone (anyone?) who subscribes to the RSS feed. There are probably some duplicates or refreshed items on the feed. In return for any inconvenience, I promise to post more often.

I initially played around with hugo more than 3 years ago, and even went so far as to make another site with it. Needless to say, that didn’t go very far, so all of my non-protozoic output will appear here. That means there will some non-photography related content. Again, I apologize. If you are only interested in ‘technical’ articles, you can subscribe to the articles feed. Unfortunately, hugo does not created feeds or pages for specific subdirectories. The best I can offer if you are interested only in photography is to subscribe to the photography tag. I will do my best to update the film techdocs, particularly with respect to Kodak.²

I’m also going to try to fix the damn search formatting, but I won’t promise anything.

Why move?

nanoc was very capable. No complaints there. The main issue was that nanoc is written in ruby. Actually, that’s not the main issue. The real issue is that I don’t know ruby that well, or really at all. I learned enough to get it up and running, but in the last few years, ruby has progressed as has nanoc, and I’ve forgotten all of the ruby that I knew. I was faced with doing an upgrade of all the software, so why not switch to hugo? Two nice things about hugo:

1. It is fast.
2. It is compiled and easily installed by brew. So I can treat it like a regular-assed program, and not some scripty thing that I have to constantly tweak.

To be fair, learning another obtuse and obscure templating system was annoying. But that is done, and once I realized that most of the things I was trying to do in hugo were done in the template and not elsewhere, I made a lot more progress.