Categories
Life Weblogging

Help with Hugo

A wonderful boquet of flowers.A couple weeks back my WordPress weblog started doing funny things. Apparently someone was able to gain access to it via my Jetpack login and install a bitcoin mining service. Joy.

When you’d visit my site you’d occasionally get booted to another site, typically one that wasn’t nice, but on occasion it was what appeared to be a nice weblog. I’m not sure who’s it was but it wasn’t wanted.

So I disabled the site and put up a temporary placeholder page while I figured out what to do about it. This is the second time I’ve had to make changes because my WordPress site was broken into. It makes having a blog a lot less fun when idiots break you stuff.

I decided I’d install Hugo and figure out how to use it to automagically post on my server. I found a nice page documenting how to use git with git triggers to publish a Hugo based weblog and went about trying it out. It works fine, but there is something I can’t figure out.

When publishing I would like to have my front page contain some number of blog posts with permalinks to those posts. E.G. Clicking on the title would take you to a URL like

https://iam.fahrni.me/2018/01/08/2017-iphone-homescreen/

. Notice the yyyy/mm/dd format in the URL. I want that exact thing for my Hugo pages so I can import what I already have and not mess up links to my existing posts. Hugo looks like it can do this, but there’s one thing that bugs me and I haven’t been able to figure it out.

When you click on the permalink it displays a URL like the one above but the file doesn’t actually exist at that location. It must use some JavaScript to do the work, I guess? I have no clue because I don’t grok how web pages and JavaScript really operate.

Can someone please let me know if Hugo can generate a standalone HTML file and drop it into a directory with yyyy/mm/dd format so I can maintain what I already have? If I can do that I’m all in with Hugo. Otherwise it’s off to find a fully baked blogging system that can do what I want.

Categories
Weblogging

Up and running

I got my site back up and running last night. I’m still on WordPress because I still have questions about how Hugo works and until I get those answered I’m keeping the site the way it is.

To get back online I deleted my WordPress installation and started fresh. I was able to plug in the database information during installation and use my existing stuff. No fuss, no muss.

There is one strange thing going on. Some of my posts have had the apostrophe replaced with what looks to be encoded representations. It’s weird and I’ve fixed up a few.

This time around I didn’t install a bunch of plugins and the site is super quick. No Jetpack, no caching, nothing. Just a couple small plugins that come with the installation. That’s it.

I’m also using a WordPress default template for now because it works.

I still hope to move to Hugo but I need to get some questions answered first. More later.