New Year - New Engine
Chyrp pretty much died (last update in 2016), Chyrp Lite’s codebase is too different at this point (I have custom feathers, custom image processing and probably a few other things, and I don’t remember at all how I did any of it), and having a website with an outdated CMS is a major security hole. I’ve heard of Jekyll, but hadn’t thought much about Static Site Generators until I encountered Erik McClure’s website (through a link to Pony Clicker). I saw what he did with his blog, though about what I needed for my blog and eventually decided to migrate to a static website. I had a choice between Jekyll and Hugo. Jekyll required a Ruby environment and had some dependencies, while Hugo was written in Go and was compiled into a single binary. Also SlackBuilds had Hugo and didn’t have Jekyll. So Hugo it is.
And after 2-3 weeks of occasional effort and a few late nights working out the quirks, here it is, a static blog made with Hugo. I ported all functions I needed (Chyrp’s feathers translate pretty well into Hugo’s layouts and archetypes) and the default theme, which I ported to Bootstrap back in the day; I also finished it, unlike back in the day. I also repaired broken Shadowbox functionality with Fancybox and added Plyr player for video- and audio-based posts. Bootstrap was upgraded to 4.4, which removed Glyphicons, so I switched to FontAwesome instead. Hugo’s aliases in front matter allows me to keep old links functioning, which is really cool, because I really didn’t want to create all those redirects manually.
In order to move posts from Chyrp to Hugo I had to write a script that would do it for me (Python FTW). It’s not general purpose, so I’m on a fence whether I want to share it or not. I also might share the Firecrest Responsive theme for Hugo.
I was kinda discouraged by Chyrp being dead and my theme being incomplete, also I was really lazy to write anything, so I posted all my updates to Twitter and Mastodon instead (and I still can’t decide which one would be my main social media; after all, despite all the inconveniences, Twitter is integrated nearly everywhere, even Nintendo Switch). Hopefully, there will be more posts throughout the year.
