The site toolchain as it stands

I said initially that it was my intention that I would talk about the process of building this website, if for no other reason that it helps me to get my own thoughts in order to write them down like this and it’s a good habit to form for keeping intellectually engaged in a piece of work. I’ve blogged before for other reasons and it seems to me that this is as good a one as any. It’s entirely possible (note to self, create sarcasm font, also note to self, add something to make footnotes) I’m not the only person out here who is struggling with the expectation that they will have some kind of marketable presence. If my own experiences can help them so much the better.

So, the site has been pretty wobbly as I essentially relearned how to host a static web site in the modern world. It’s been kind of an eye-opener. I knew enough to know I wanted some kind of templating engine, so I started looking at options. Intially, I was tinkering with Nikola but as comfortable as it would have felt to be doing everything in Python, I wasn’t crazy about it and I ran across Hugo and that was that. It’s just so stupidly fast. So, I dove in quickly. Followed a decent tutorial to get standing, then undid a lot of theming and started over with a presentation layer I could understand.

The site source is hosted on bitbucket.org. The site itself is hosted on netlify.com and automatically built from the repo’s main branch whenever HEAD moves. It’s a nice system and it’s cleanly tied to the git workflow which I sometimes hate but mostly really like.

Speaking of git, I have to take a moment to sincerely apologize to the people at sublimeHQ. I know I need to buy a license. Believe you me, the first thing I’m doing when I get a job is paying you for both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge because they are magnificent, beautifully crafted tools and I love using them. Text is superb (or you know, was superb once I figured out how to turn on modal). And Merge. I don’t even know what to tell you about Merge. I would have sworn up and down that I wouldn’t ever use a gui interface for git and I was wrong in that wonderfully thorough way I tend to be. What a lovely, lovely, tool. Thank you for not crippling it. I’m using it all day working on the process of getting a job to send you money to pay for this software which is worth every penny you charge for it.

Next steps are going to be to build out new templates and layouts for contact, cv, and bio pages, from scratch and begin planning a more permanent presentation. Also, I need to do some testing of import functions to bring in content from my older blogger.com blogs, and whether or not the tagging in their content will need to be cleaned up, etc. It’s ever thus with old content. So, the site continues to develop, and I’m genuinely having fun working on it.