Oh, it’s not just in RSS!! Page is still up!

Love it when this kind of thing shows up in my RSS reader so I can use it as an example in my content management systems class.

Early 2025 was a difficult time for my focus and mental health given all of the nonsense happening in my country at the time. I channeled a lot of my anxiety and distraction into messing around with my Hugo site, which is both something I find genuinely fun and something that is professionally useful, since I teach a course on content management systems where I’ve doubled down on Hugo as a teaching tool. Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of my observation that it was “[t]ime to write up a summary post,” and I’m finally getting around to that today. Waiting so long to write that post means that some of my memories are a little fuzzy now, but I made some further updates to my site over the summer and then again last December, so a “the last year in Hugo adventures” post allows me to capture some of that stuff, too.

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.

Look, I don’t know all the finer points of this debate, but Mullenweg has repeatedly struck me as petty and juvenile, so it’s hard to imagine taking his side on any of the more substantive issues here.

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.

This morning, I’m realizing (and somewhat to my horror) that some of my reflection on whether to change up one of my classes essentially mirrors the ed psych debates about constructivism versus direct instruction that I found so intolerable in grad school.

It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts.

I’m on Bluesky now, I guess?

First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter. I’m especially happy that Mormon Twitter seems to be re-emerging on Bluesky, since that’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most. I also think a lot of Bluesky features (domain name-based handles, starter packs, better trust and safety features) are neat!

Teaching my project-focused WordPress class keeps me humble: I answer so many student questions with “I don’t know how to do that, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.”

In our big content management systems class project this semester, students are knocking it out of the park in a way that makes me proud of them but also reassures me that maybe I understand this stuff despite no formal training after all.

I am slowly writing something related to open source governance this semester, so naturally this story keeps getting wilder to give me things to think about.

This was a hell of a semester to decide to not dedicate a whole lecture to WordPress in my CMS class.

I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow.

Like much software, I only know as much Git as I need to get my stuff done, but I’m pleased to report that some code conflicts in class finally got me to learn .gitignore.

More than once, I have gotten myself in trouble while teaching my WordPress class by getting out of my web hosting comfort zone. Today, though, I pulled off some DNS and cPanel stuff right on the edge of my limits, so let’s hope sailing stays smooth for the whole semester. 🤞🏻

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.

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.

I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).

My second-to-last class meeting for my content management course featured an impromptu lecture on how URL structure is undervalued by both web users and site designers. It wasn’t irrelevant to course concepts, but I hadn’t been planning on it either.

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.

Haven’t read this yet, but I’m bookmarking for my classes.

Fall 2023 will mark my fifth time teaching my department’s class on Content Management Systems. I have really loved taking on this class and making it my own over the past several years. It’s also been fun to see how teaching the class has seeped into the rest of my life: It’s a “cannot unsee” situation (in a good way!) where the concepts I teach work themselves into everyday encounters with the news, my own websites, and other things around the internet.

Slowly realizing that I have no choice but to make generative AI one of the themes of my content management class in the fall.