$ ❯ CrowderSoup

In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to keep this site simple. That I wanted to build on a solid foundation. I didn’t want to muck with that foundation to make my site look “pretty”. I shared the un-styled version of this site on my socials when @Duffy mentioned Simple.css. I fell in love with the idea of it right away. A classless css framework that applies styling to semantic markup?

Things look a little — ahem — different around here, don’t they? I think if you look carefully you’ll notice a few things have changed 😅 I recently decided that I wanted to change up my personal site and build from a solid foundation. There wasn’t anything wrong with my old theme. Far from it! It worked really well. I just wanted to have something that was purpose built for what I wanted.

I recently found a really cool VSCode extension called FrontMatter. It allows you to manage your static site with a simple, intuitive interface, all within VSCode. This is the first post I’m writing with it. It sort of feels like a halfway point between managing plain text / markdown files and having a full-blown CMS. For my use, I don’t need something like WordPress… Markdown files and Hugo is plenty. But having a nice interface to see a list of posts, media, etc.

Once upon a time there was a full-stack software developer who could NOT stop redoing his personal Website. I think this might be the 50th or 60th time I’ve done it in the last 10ish years that I’ve owned this domain. I have used all sorts of content management systems (even wrote a couple of my own) and static site generators. WordPress, OctoberCMS, Pelican, Hugo, etc. But I keep coming back to Hugo.

This site has had a couple new themes lately, but I’ve finally settled on one: Basics Plus. This is actually a theme that I’ve forked from Basics. It’s a fairly simple and paired down theme. I forked it so that I could change a couple things: The top menu (more dynamic, able to add more items) Add Disqus comments The byline These are some fairly small feature changes. I plan to make more changes / refinements going forward while keeping the clean / simple look and feel.

I’ve been making some efforts to streamline the publishing process for this site. I’ve read about tools like Netlify and Lektor, but I wanted to keep things as close to a basic Hugo site as possible. To that end, I wanted to use git hooks to run hugo whenever I ran git commit. That way to publish a new post I simply had to write it in markdown, save, commit and push.

Using HTTPS for your site has lots of benefits. Chief among them being security. Using HTTPS ensures that no one can intercept and read traffic between you and the site you’re visiting. However, it’s traditionally been somewhat difficult and expensive to provide HTTPS for your sites visitors. Now though, with Let’s Encrypt an SSL certificate is free! And if you’re using GitHub pages with a custom domain for hosting using it couldn’t be easier.

I’ve added my Keybase Proof as a text file at the root of this site. I used to have my site proven via DNS but for whatever reason CloudFlare removed my TXT record breaking the proof. I decided that having the .txt file proof was more resilient because even if I change hosting (Currently on Github Pages) my proof will remain intact. If you aren’t on Keybase check it out. I like to think of it as “crypto-as-a-service”.

Last night I got the wild hare to migrate my personal site from Pelican to Hugo. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now, so to give myself the push I needed to get it done I deleted my old personal site from Github. Differences Front Matter Honestly the biggest different for content is “front matter”. Both Hugo and Pelican, as static site generators, use front matter to describe pieces of content.