Your Own Website Setup VS Convenience
When I made the first post for the challenge I’m doing this month, which involves writing a post and a journal entry every day, I encountered some scripting issues with the setup I’m using Hugo and Netlify.
I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and decided to upgrade the Hugo version, even though I knew it could potentially bring more issues, such as theme incompatibilities due to breaking changes. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
The other issue that didn’t occur was the one I was originally facing. For some reason, the new posts weren’t showing up, and the Netlify console logs were indicating that there were no changes with the new commit I was pushing.
Then, after going to bed, the next morning I decided to publish a test post with an older date. Surprisingly, when I pushed the changes, all the previous posts appeared. I still don’t fully understand what happened, but I speculate that it had nothing to do with the test post itself. Instead, it might have been related to a cache that got cleared after updating to the new Hugo version. However, I suspect, it took a while for the cache to be completely cleared.
The important thing is that it’s working now.
However, this brings me to what I want to discuss today. I started blogging in 2004 when I moved from Brazil to Australia for my studies. At that time, I used a free Brazilian blogging platform called WebLogger. Later on, I transferred all my posts to my own domain and started using my own installation of WordPress on a shared hosting. Then, there was Jekyll, and now there’s Hugo. (I’m not even sure why I migrated to Hugo, although I talked about it briefly here)
As mentioned in the linked post, it seems like I’ve been more interested in blogging tools than in actual blogging. And that has mostly been true, until now.
I’m getting tired of constantly dealing with tools. Choosing a static website tool wasn’t the wisest decision, especially now that I’m interested in IndieWeb and the protocols that support it. It has become more difficult to use and expand those protocols with a static website. Currently, for instance, my micropub isn’t functioning, and I have to fix it myself. If I had opted for managed hosting with WordPress and used IndieWeb plugins, it would likely require less maintenance and be more convenient.
So, I’m contemplating taking the convenient route and migrating back to WordPress or simply using my Micro.blog account as the main blog. I would need to find a way to migrate all my old posts there. By the way, if you’re not familiar with Micro.blog, I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion, it’s the best platform if you want to be hands-free and part of the IndieWeb. Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.blog, has done an excellent job with it. If you want to see my posts there, you can find them at micro.antonio.is.
For now, I’ll keep things as they are, but I’ll bear this in mind. I simply don’t want to go through another blog migration. Instead, I want to write more here and perhaps blog in other places as well.
UPDATE: I figure out two days later what was wrong. My post date was using -7 timezone instead of my local -3 one, so Hugo script wasn’t creating the page because the page was in the future.