New Site

After all the bullshit with Wordpress (not linking to Wordpress, because fuck Matt Mullenweg) I wanted to move away from that. I’d spend some time playing around with static site generators, mostly Hugo and Ignite.

One of my requirements is the ability to easily include photo albums from SmugMug; something that’s also a pain with Wordpress. You’d think this would be easy with Ignite, but my Swift is poor enough that it was proving to be a real pain. My limited playing with Hugo seemed positive, but I felt like I was killing myself with overhead in getting image IDs.

I had a bit of a play with SQL Page in the past, and was quite impressed with it. It’s very simple to use, even for an SQL muppet like me. I built out a basic site all driven from a SQLite database, and it worked pretty well. SQL Page makes it really easy to query a remote API and treat the JSON result as a query, so importing images was simple. However, I kept running out of time to invest in building an admin interface to add posts, so things were still quite manual.

Randomly - and I honestly can’t remember how this came about! - I discovered that Hugo can, at site build time, call an external API, parse the response, and make the data available to the template. By simply including an array of album IDs in the post “front matter”, amd making a simple mod to the template, I can very easily create a gallery of thumbnails. Amazing! So, now I’m back with Hugo.

Still some work in progress: For example, I’ll extend the theme to include a thumbnail image with the summary in the list pages. Content migration is more important though!