New Site! Again!

Well.. the old new site didn’t last as long as I thought it would. The core intention of using a platform I couldn’t control, somewhat worked. I did write more, I did post more. Notion also gave me a limited palette to work with, which was extremely helpful when designing how the content-flow would work. Editing from my phone and making drafts was great. Notion databases are still pretty damn great and very versatile.

But… I ran into limitations, and Notion has a pretty decent API… When I wanted to add RSS to my Notion site, I could. So the “lack of tinkering” objective started to fall apart. I could fix limitations, so I did. So, I was still doing the work, but on someone else’s platform that is not cheap. As of this writing, having a custom domain on a Notion site costs $96USD/year.

Combine that with my push to move more of my web services to self-hosted ones, going back to building my own site was easy enough to fall back into. This time I chose Hugo. Go is my main language and I’ve used Hugo in smaller projects before. So far, I like it. I took the time to develop my own theme using PicoCSS and modeled it after how the Notion site looked and worked.

So far, I like it. The extremely-simple HTML+CSS keeps the site fast. I don’t need any fancy JS with all the pre-processing Hugo enables. I added a ton of parameters and taxonomies to help keep the site oragnized. Its not quite as flexible as a Notion database, but Hugo’s Taxonomy system is pretty flexible. Currently, you can filter by licenses, tags, or content type (like blog posts), projects, or game clips). I’d like to eventually dig into how I could combine taxonomies so people could make hyper-specific filters, but that’s a project for another day.

One thing I did get for free was RSS support everywhere. Want an RSS feed for just projects? Sure. What about an RSS feed just for my 3D design? Yep, right here. Maybe you’re broken in the same way I am and just love Public Domain. Yeah, there’s an RSS feed for that. Its seriously cool. Great for readers who only want specific things for me, and also pretty good for those who want to see everything I do. I configured the RSS feeds to have full articles, no click-throughs required here. Use this site how you want. Let me know if I can make it better.

Powering the site is my tried-and-true Wireguard Backhaul, connected back to an nginx container that gets built by self-hosted Gitea Actions. Updates to my site are a git push away. It limits what I can do away from my computer, but I hardly ever wrote full posts on my phone, so this seems like a fine tradeoff.

I hope the content organization I’ve designed with Hugo is flexible-enough to last and less-brittle than my aging Jekyll site was. Only time will tell.

So.. One this is missing here, right? Where’s the source, Tom? Well… I’m not publishing it. At least, not like this, and not right now. Its not that I’m embarrassed by the code. Its kinda trash in places, but that’s fine, people know my code can be a trainwreck. Its actually because I really want to use the git repo for in-progress posts, notes, and private-drafts. Putting all that out there would force me to store drafts somewhere outside the repo, or not push them anywhere. Those two things would greatly hurt the workflow I’ve built up. I have so many half-written posts in Notion, and its fine because they’re just for me. I can include dumb questions, notes to myself, references to old memories that drive the themes in my writing, and I don’t really want any of that “on the record”. I want a distinct line between “my thoughts” and “my publications”. Thoughts are messy, I want to at least try to clean up my nonsense before putting it out into the world.

So.. No code. At least not right now. I’ll likely publish the site without any content one day in case someone wants to see how its built. It will be permissively-licensed like most of my other projects.

So, lets see if I can keep up occasional writing and project releases. At the very least, the site is much faster and more searchable. If you see any bugs or typos and want to do me a favor hit me up on Bluesky.