Finally realizing that I accidentally removed my site’s commenting overlay a few months ago and getting it back up. 🙃

My spouse asked last night what that morning’s advent calendar tea had been. It had been a long day, so I couldn’t remember at first, and that short exchange entirely justified the 45 minutes I’d spent on Monday building a new “teablog” content type onto my Hugo site.

I also want to give myself a winter project of adding yet more social functionality to my core Hugo presence (ActivityPub? reposting social stuff?). I shouldn’t be giving myself more winter projects, but this is stuff I’ve wanted to do for ages, soooo

Je suis content de découvrir combien il est facile de changer mon site Hugo en version multilangue, mais il y aura des conséquences pour le POSSE si je ne suis pas attentif…

One of my favorite ways of stretching my Hugo and Siri Shortcuts skills is thinking about features I could build into my website based off of what other services already offer. Thinking about building a game session logging system this summer…

I think I’ve finally finished all of my Hugo taxonomy-and-template side projects. Time to write up a summary post and then find something else to do as productive procrastination.

I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom. Since the very first time I taught with this combination of software, students have expressed a clear preference for WordPress, and so every time I teach the class, I think that I’m going to give it up and just focus on WordPress the next time around.

One day, I will develop some more normal hobbies. In the meantime, I’m quite pleased with the custom Hugo templates and taxonomies I’ve built to make my book reviews be a bit more like what I imagine Goodreads would be like.

I started using the static site-friendly, largely non-creepy Tinylytics service in 2023, and a few weeks ago, I finally forked over the money for the paid version of the service. [EDIT: I’ve since cancelled my subscription to the service because I’m no longer sure it aligns with my values.] This year, I’ve become skeptical enough of quantification as a concept that I feel vaguely guilty about tracking which of my posts get how many views, but I’m also a researcher who understands the value of quantification, and it’s also, well, validating to see which of my posts get traction. That said, I still know not to put too much faith in these numbers—for example, I got a very abnormal 537 hits to my website from Finland on October 24th that I just can’t figure out.

Several days ago, I posted that:

One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it.

A couple of days later, I realized I wasn’t alone in this when Alex Sirac picked up the post on their website, and it got another sympathetic comment there, too. That motivated me to really try to solve the problem, even though as a Hugo blogger, I knew that my solution wasn’t going to be terribly helpful for the WordPress folks who were sympathizing with me.

… and as long as I’m posting about fun-but-unnecessary website hacks I don’t have time for, I’d also love to redo the taxonomies and templates on my site to make it easy to navigate media reviews by author, title, series, etc. No one would use it but me, but I’d have a lot of fun with it.

A lot of my Hugo hacks are ugly, but I’m happy that I’ve figured it out well enough to be able to do the hacks in the first place.

Summer is my traditional time for messing around with my Hugo site. It’s relaxing, but it’s also professional development, given that I teach content management systems every fall.

One of my favorite things about Hugo is how much work I can do on a website from my phone (so long as I have a git client installed). Editing text files from a small screen isn’t a big deal.

This week, I’m attending two different research conferences (well, I only barely attended the first one, to be honest). The leadup to these conferences has involved some changes to my web presence, just in case people actually check my website when I put it on my slides. Overall, I’m happy with the changes that I’ve made, so I thought I’d take advantage of my free Delta in-flight wi-fi to blog about some of the changes I’ve made and why.

Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.

Unborking my blogging automations has been a pain, but on the upside, changing how I do it in Siri Shortcuts has fixed something small in my linkposts that’s bugged me for years.

Si vous voyez ce message, j’aurai réussi à refaire mes raccourcis pour poster depuis mon portable.

Something somewhere has borked, and now my Siri Shortcuts for near-effortless posting to Hugo from my phone are producing dumpster fire text files filled with URL encoded characters instead of the real things. Gonna have to fix this, but not looking forward to it.

So neat! Gotta figure this out for my Hugo site.

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change.

switching to Habitica

In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers. I really like Streaks, but there are a couple of things that don’t sit quite right. Besides, to be honest, sometimes just changing things up feels like a breath of fresh air and lets me double down on picking up new habits. After looking into a few different options, I decided to give Habitica another try. I’ve used this gamified habit tracker a couple of times in the past, and besides the gamification gimmick, there are some things about it that I really like.

There’s a lot I love about using Hugo for my website, but one of the best bits is that since posts are stored as text files, it’s remarkably straightforward to write a script to do bulk edits.

As I’ve been working on updating this website and revamping my web presence over the course of the summer, one of the items on my to-do list has been to add a commenting feature to the website. I love Hugo, but the absence of any in-built commenting feature is definitely a downside. I’ve looked over various Hugo-compatible commenting systems, but I honestly don’t know how much commenting activity I’ll see, and I’ve been hesitant to pay a third-party platform to do all of this for me.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks how to best add commenting to my Hugo static site, and it just hit me that I could embed Hypothesis and use that as a social layer. Very excited about this idea.

The more I mess around with hacking my Hugo site, the more qualified I feel to teach my content management systems class.