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Blog maintenance

I recently moved this blog from Jekyll to Hugo. This was a smooth transition, with barely any manual work.

I could have left it at that. I should have left it at that. But, I had to torture myself and manually adjust every post I ever wrote.

What did I do, and why? #

I underwent the megalomaniac Herculean (or Sisyphus) task of going through every post I ever wrote, but why?

I fixed small issues that crept in over the years:

  • reformatted the weird date format I had to use from way back when that was needed for Hugo (“2023-01-27T00:00:00Z” instead of “2023-01-27”)
  • use tags instead of categories: I can now use multiple, instead of one
  • as the previous categories didn’t make sense, I renamed them

And had to make fixes because of the Hugo transition:

  • fixing shortcodes (for example YouTube embedding)
  • remove HTML (by default, Hugo disallows raw HTML, it can be enabled, but I like the idea)
  • figures with caption (I used to put a line of text below an image, but Hugo has a nice figure shortcut)
  • fixed links (the old links had the category name, new links have the full date)

And then I added upgrades:

  • moved pictures to same folder as the article: this makes it easier to work with editors (iA Writer) and gives a neater folder architecture. I can do this with Hugo as it has the nice feature “page bundles” (which Hugo doesn’t have)
  • I added series for posts that belong together (such as my series on Axure tips)
  • and I improved things “underwater”, making me ready for better html and CSS

How’s it going? #

I’m not 100% done yet; there’s four more years to go Done! It’s a slow process as I only do this “maintenance” in my off-hours, when I’m unfocused or have some time to kill.

It’s fun to read (or scan) all my previous articles, and see what interested me in the past. On the other hand, a lot of this work feels like “a chore”. Nobody cares if I added tags to my articles. Nobody cares about the series or the image captions. I’m glad when this whole ordeal is over, and I can go back to writing again 😅