57 lines
		
	
	
		
			2.2 KiB
		
	
	
	
		
			Markdown
		
	
	
	
	
	
			
		
		
	
	
			57 lines
		
	
	
		
			2.2 KiB
		
	
	
	
		
			Markdown
		
	
	
	
	
	
---
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title: Building my Blog with Hugo
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description: Why I'm switching away from simple bash scripts
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category: article
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draft: false
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date: 2021-09-10
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---
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For a while now I've been using `pandoc` and a combination of shell scripts to build and deploy my site via a gitlab CI/CD pipeline.
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Given that I want to start sharing my site to more people I realized I need a way to generate some meta data for each page.
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In order to this I have to somehow:
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* Tag each page with meta data that other sites can look at
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* Make sure the build system is aware of this new meta-data
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Inserting meta data into posts and page source code isn't too hard but there is the problem of standardizing a format which meets my criteria of:
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* Easy to write
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* Easy to parse
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* Preferably not verbose to keep things small
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* As robust as possible
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That last one is the part that makes this really hard to implement if I'm being honest.
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Yes I could come up with a format and use something like `sed` or `awk` to replace markdown with inline HTML and do some wizardy on the compilation script to `cat` partial html files together properly but...
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After having already done similar things for other projects I know exactly how painful that can be, especially to do it well.
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## Why Hugo
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1. Instant support for yaml meta data in each markdown file
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2. Pages are built out of go-templates with javascript
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3. Templates
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It's literally just the templates.
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The fact is I have two templates that I care about right now: `posts` and `index`.
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> What about styling and making sure you don't lose the charm of the site?
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I can literally re-use the same style sheet from before with Hugo and fonts can also stay where they are.
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No Javascript is ever compiled and sent to the browser.
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> What build advantages do you get from this?
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Robustness. I can build out tons of pages in reasonable amounts of time with no mysterious errors and have a ton of flexibility when it comes to adapting templates to be something new.
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> Aren't you locked into a single theme this way?
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Yes but most people's themes send a ton of Javascript which I don't want to do ever
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> Can I see what the theme looks like?
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Sure: [click here for the theme](https://gitlab.com/shockrah/shockrah-city/-/tree/master/themes/shockrah.xyz)
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