Take Two

So you may have noticed it's been pretty close to a year since I last tried anything with this site. That's because Hugo sucks and I hate it.

Okay, maybe that's unfair. The problem I had with Hugo was that I tried to update it with a new post, and it didn't update. Couple other things just refused to work as well, like how I wanted to archive the old site and the link just refused to go anywhere.

I've since tried a few other static site generators, such as Jekyll, Pelican, and Publii. Jekyll was also hard to understand, Pelican clicked with me, but had no decent themes, and Publii was rock simple to use, but also had no good themes. There were probably others I'm forgetting, but the fact is, if I can't get it to work and look good out of the box, it's probably unusable for me. Writing is my only skill, I'm not a programmer or any kind of web developer. Hell, even though I dabbled in very simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the themes for these SSGs were very opaque to me, so I couldn't even modify any of them.

Well, fast forward to now. I was getting back on that SSG bullshit, only to find that way too many of them are effectively dead. I found one that was promising and looked at its GitHub only to find the last commit was two years ago, for example. I soon came back to Publii. There are still things I don't like about Publii, but honestly, since it's a GUI program with no confusing front matter category folder bullshit, at least it's going to get out of my way and just work. I hope. They even finally got a good theme! Terminal was originally from Hugo, I think, and I thought it was pretty attractive, even though I didn't pick it. Well, whatever problems I had with it before, I'll take what I can get now.

I just know somebody's going to swoop in here and tell me that actually, Hugo is soooo much better because response times or some esoteric programming reason. Dude, I don't care. I work slowly and get distracted easily at the best of times, the last thing I need is to have the tools I use also get in my way.

Publii devs, if you happen to stumble upon this, please let me import HTML and/or Markdown files as posts. Maybe even plain text files, too. Also, what were you thinking making the social media share and link plugins premium? Why those? Especially the link plugin, and come to think of it, why is that a plugin? Whatever, I just made a link to my Mastodon manually in the footer. 

What I said about my social media usage still holds true, by the by. Best way to contact me is at the Wandering Shop. I hope to see you all again soon with another post, for real this time. May have to finagle a couple things still...