There have been changes. I’ve alluded to some, but I don’t think I’ve fully described others. So here’s the breakdown of how this shitpile is currently being handled.

I’ve moved away from Jekyll since the number of posts and my template had bogged down site generation to the point of being virtually impossible to update any longer. The limitations of the Ruby language become painfully evident with maintaining a reasonably sized Jekyll blog. The stop after that was Hugo. A static site generator similar to Jekyll but written in the quite-quick language “Go”. So far it’s been an excellent utility. There have been some growing pains having migrated to Hugo relatively early in the Hugo development process. There have been broken things that have required bandages along the way. I still have no regrets.

A couple paths I could’ve taken would be Gatsby or 11ty. Both look incredibly promising with some excellent details available. Check them out. They’re pretty awesome.

Early on I just had a folder I worked out of for my blog source files. I also had shoved the theme files into my folder with no regard to keeping my blog alive. I was modifying theme files directly, which is pretty stupid. It breaks your ability to perpetually maintain your blog in tandem with the theme you’re using. The best way to handle customizing themes is to use your static site generator’s built in process for that. Gatsby calls it “Shadowing” and Hugo calls it “Leftmost wins”. They’re both basically the same concept, and I bet they’re applied similarly programmatically. The idea is that you have your theme files shoved into a “theme” folder, and you can mirror the directory structure of your theme in the parent directory of your project. However, you modify that file, and it takes precedent over the theme files themselves in generating your site. I’ve tried it in both Gatsby and recently re-worked my original blog to use this strategy in Hugo, and both work outstandingly well. Another benefit to doing this: If you need to update something in your theme that’s critical, you can simply submit a pull request to the developer of the theme itself.

Now, however, I’m using git to synchronize my files across multiple devices. I’m also using git to keep my theme updated. Git is fucking awesome software. Use it. Support it. It’s awesome. I just have git set up over ssh on a raspberry pi and it’s just goddamned stellar to use. I don’t even need Github! Don’t use Github. If you need something like it, just take a look at Gitlab or similar.

So, yeah. That’s the current state of the blog. Also, let me fucking tell you, it’s possible to use this setup on Win10 but it’s not super easy. Win10 has been the Achilles Heel of this whole setup, especially with Win10’s filesystem limitations.