!! P.S. Static site is now live on grumpygamer.com !!
I spent the last weekend converting grumpygamer.com to a static website using Hugo.
I don’t really know why. The old dynamic site was working fine.
It’s still hosted it on my server but there is no php, etc. I may move it to a static site hosting platform.
If your reading this, you’re on the new static site.
So far Hugo has been great. It’s Go mark-up language is a little odd, but I’m used to it now.
The old site used markdown but I added some odd new rules and porting all the posts over was kind of a pain. Wrote a php script that pulled down all the posts and wrote them out as json. I then wrote a Python script to find all my odd markdown hacks and convert them to the standard markdown that Hugo uses.
All in all, it only took a few hours and now it render 90% right. There are still a few goofy tags I need to fix by hand.
The images were hosted on a CDN and I moved them locally. I’ve become concerned with the complexity of software. I’m getting to the point where I want everything under my control and simple.
The Thimbleweed Park dev blog was a complicated mess of databases and servers. Something went wrong and the whole thing collapsed. I ending up rendering the whole site out as static html and just hosting that since it wasn’t changing.
I would have been better off with a static site from the beginning, hence this move to Hugo.
One of the reasons I haven’t posted much was the complexity to writing an article
I’m hoping this will be easier.
The one big issue is comments.
I shut down comments after the Return to Monkey Island shit storm and I’ve been reluctant to turn them back on. Can’t we all just get along.
Comments on a static site are an tricky issue. There are some third party solutions like Disqus but I worry about Big Comment sucking up personal information of anyone who comments on my site.
I did watch a YouTube video about how to add comments to a Hugo site and it just requires a little javascript and I can hook it into my existing comment system.
The good news if that system goes down all I lose are the comments, not the whole site. I might give that a try at some point.
Things I still need to do:
Make the site responsive to changes in window size (i.e. mobile)Fix up the missing markdown.Get rss working again so the old url still works.Clean up my crappy css.Get social media cards working again.- Write some new posts that makes this all worth it.
I’d also like the site to be built with CI when I push it.
P.S. I decided not to do this. A simple and quick rsync command gets it to my server and it’s one less thing I need to worry about. Remember, this was about keeping it simple.
If you notice anything odd or broken, let me know on Mastodon
P.S. I work on my website on the weekends, weekdays are for working on my game. See you next Sat.