I really didn’t expect my transition to Hugo from Ghost to be so difficult. Let me be clear, the moving over wasn’t really that hard. With a some python work, it was easy enough to get my Ghost posts here to Hugo. There were a few bumps, but nothing I didn’t anticipate. I had to forward a few URLS so that my RSS feed would keep working for those who have already subscribed. I had to do some clean up on a few posts that were interfering with the way Hugo does posts with yaml. Nothing big.

What did end up being a much bigger pain than I expected was finding a theme. Hugo doesn’t have a ton of themes available, unlike WordPress, but there are plenty. But there are actually not that many that caught my interest. I found a couple and they didn’t work for one reason or another. I found one I really liked, but it wouldn’t actually install. Then I found one that was good and was easy enough to install. But there were changes that needed to be made in order for it to be what I wanted it to be.

It turns out two things are true: some developers over complicate their hugo themes and secondly, I’m utter shite at CSS. I mean like bottom basement level bad. I used to be pretty good. Not professional, but I could customize how my links look. Now, apparently, no. I can’t do that. Or at least I couldn’t do that with the theme I chose.

I’ve spent the last three days with this theme trying to get it to work the way I want it to. It just didn’t work. No matter what I did, I could not get it to actually pay attention to the CSS I put in there. I tried everything, nothing worked. Eventually, I gave up. I should have given up much sooner, but remember there weren’t that many themes I liked to begin with.

But I did eventually give up. And goodness gracious, am I glad I did. What you see here is just what I wanted. It is extraordinarily simple yet powerful. I can customize it easily enough, and it just feels so much better than the theme I was using before. It’s even better than the simple theme I used on Ghost.

Needless to say, however, I definitely have been frustrated at times these last few days. And then there’s the comments thing.

Comments on the Blog⌗

If you’ve been following along, I’ve talked about my comment section situation not once but twice. I’ve been struggling with this for weeks now. I tried self-hosting, and that ended up with all my comments deleted (not once, but twice), then I moved onto the third-party options.

I’ve tried them all.

And I know what you’re thinking: “Matt, there has to be one out there that you haven’t tried!”

Nope. Here’s an incomplete list of what I’ve tried:

  • Discourse
  • Disqus
  • Remark42 (twice)
  • Comentario (twice)
  • Commentbox (twice)
  • Remarkbox
  • GraphComments
  • FastComments
  • ReplyBox
  • Cusdis
  • Chirpy (twice)
  • Vissue
  • isso
  • Commento
  • Komento
  • Mastodon Comments (twice, got close, but doesn’t work with GoToSocial).

There are several more that I’m missing the names for. It has been ridiculous. In the end, I’ve decided to say “fuck comments.” There will be no comments. I’ll put something at the end of each post so people can email me or contact me on the Fediverse. That will have to be good enough for now. Disqus is probably the only solution I listed that worked. But it’s Disqus. Nobody wants to use that. I thought about one of the Git-issue based comment systems, and even tried Vissue, but I don’t want people to have to sign up for GitLab or GitHub to leave a comment and none of them support anonymous posting.

Comments are just not going to happen. It makes me a bit sad because I want to interact with people. And not just through email. Public discussion is a good thing, and something that makes blogging feel less like shouting into the void. Without comments on a blog, how do you really know that there are people even reading your stuff? Even with analytics, you can’t know for sure unless you actually talk to people.

But, I’ve lost my patience with all that is out there. I’m stepping away from the idea. At least for now. Maybe in a few days or weeks, I’ll find a better solution. Or maybe one of you guys will email me or talk to me on the Fedi about a solution that will actually work. I guess for now, we’ll see.

Hugo is my Home⌗

I will say that it has been awesome writing in full Markdown in Neovim. I feel like a new man. I didn’t realize how stifling writing in a web browser had become. I never really lost my interest in blogging, I was still doing it most every day, but damn if this doesn’t make it feel more fun. Just sitting here in front of my terminal, like a nerd, writing about whatever? It makes me want to expand what I do on the blog. A reading journal? A page for what I’m watching and listening to? A blog roll? I’m a fountain of ideas all of a sudden. I love it.

So, I’m happy with my move to Hugo. I think it was where I should have been right from the start, so it’s just about damn time. A few days with it has made me realize that this move was just what I needed all along.

-:::-

If you’d like to comment on this post, find me on the fedivers or email me. I especially want to hear from you about your own blogging adventures. And if you have a solution to my comment problem.