I’ve briefly covered thoughts around adding a comment system in to this blog since it was migrated to Hugo.

I won’t rehash the decision making process - but fundamentally I wasn’t going to go with Disqus and wanted a simpler solution. There are various options out there and tl;dr I ended up choosing HashOver, mostly for the following reasons:

1. It appeared to be reasonably simple to stand it up completely external to the ‘main’ site, i.e. in a sub-domain
2. It runs on PHP/MySQL which is already available on my host. Other commenting systems needed different stacks which I don’t have access to without switching.

Incidentally, HashOver supports other persistence options such as SQLite and even XML which if you wanted to be completely serverless which could be interesting; but as it happens this comment migration process would likely have been a fair whack harder.

A walk-through of the frustrations of operating with modern finance operations like Starling Bank. To be clear - it will never be time for crypto…

I have blogged in the past at the frustrations of trying to deal with large organisations. Several years ago, I was moaning about how much I hate ’no-reply’ from addresses in comms with BA as the example. And before that, I talked about what happens when you let your systems run your comms, like TripAdvisor does.

Here’s a quick tip to help you find something you may have tweeted in the past. Provided you can remember a word or two about it, then chances are you’ll be able to find it with Twitter’s advanced search.

Simply head to https://twitter.com/search-advanced?lang=en which will pop open a nifty form which is pretty self-explanatory:

but that form scrolls, allowing you to target specific accounts:

Robert’s your father’s brother. Magic.

My heart is broken. x RIP Frankie, 2007-2022 💔 The best hound ever.

I’ve posted earlier in this series my thoughts and experiences of migrating a Wordpress blog over to Hugo. So far I have not been too favourable although the majority of that is down to the muscle-memory invested in having a browser-based CMS publishing platform and the many conveniences that provides you.

One of the major teething issues I was having was with the literal publishing process of new content. For a brand new site - it’s pretty simple, you create your output and then just SFTP the whole dang lot up to your webhost.

Update after a few weeks…

It’s worth prefacing this with a short detour as to why I upgraded migrated this blog from Wordpress. I’ve already published some technical and other reasons for it - performance and security mainly - but the subtext to it all was that I wanted to get back in to blogging - and blogging more regularly.

For some reason, I had become convinced - possibly persuaded - that doing this in a static file generator such as Hugo was the way. A fresh start in a new environment without some of the “overhead” of Wordpress would unlock a passion for writing again - and empower me to write regularly.

In 2021, I spent a lot of time (a) working and (b) training for a half-Ironman.

In 2022, I want to turn some of that focus back towards some creative things. I’ve already dusted off my Flickr account¹, I’ve created an “Insta” for more regular photo blogging-y things but to be honest, the main thing I want to have more fun with is video.

I’m not talking TikTok (not yet at least!) but there are many ideas I have for getting more creative with video. I’d like to produce a few short films. I have no idea what that really means. But I’ve had a lot of fun producing the militant cyclist stuff…

This post has been in draft for some time and to be honest it’s been long enough now that I don’t know exactly what I had planned to write.

SO WHY WRITE IT? I hear you mumble. Well, that’s a good question, but it’s not how my OCD allows me to operate. There was a reason.

So for now, though, until my memory sorts itself out, I’ll just explore the topic a little, and maybe update it again in the future.

Initial thoughts on Hugo vs Wordpress

The move to Hugo from Wordpress was a long time coming but also a little impulsive. I’d used Wordpress for a long time and had become accustomed to its pros and cons. It’s too soon to talk confidently and about good or bad bits, so here are just some observations.

Also, it’s worth pointing out this quote that sits on the official Hugo forums which neatly encaptures the intended users of Hugo:

Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo

Important caveat: I am not a Hugo expert. I almost said not yet. But I doubt I ever will be. I am literally winging this. The main Hugo site is really good and far better than this site.

Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo was actually a reasonably straight-forward process. There are plenty of articles out there covering it and I was following this one and this one- which also does a nice job of why you might want to move to Hugo (or a static site) in the first place.