Refresh

After three years, it’s maybe time to refresh this website.

Besides all the other home-related Information Technology (IT) tasks on my massive To Do list, I want to evaluate the Nue and Hugo static website development environments. This is that report. But, it’s a work in progress, so at the moment it isn’t fleshed out. In fact, I might not replace what I have, but instead just change the theme a bit. I haven’t decide yet.

For those who don’t drink the koolaid, a static web site is one where all the contents and assets are created once, copied to a stand-alone web server, and just served over HTTPS, like this one is; or most anything really, that runs on a site that provides web hosting without setting up and managing your own web server.

A dynamic website, on the other hand, will have the web server (or usually another connected server) create pages on the fly by consulting databases and other services — like Ghost does. This allows a lot more flexibility. For example, the pages can be served from a Content Management System (CMS), and the web pages themselves can be tailored to the person viewing them. Although I’m pretty sure my little server could run it, I don’t really need that much power, since the content doesn’t change all that much and it’s not a web store to sell things.

It gets a little confusing when a static website can serve client-side Javascript which can make a website look dynamic, usually in a single-page application (SPA), like the Souvenir page on this web site.

Besides the cringe-worthy esthetics I tossed up as a first version, I’m not happy with the Jekyll system I have now, since it’s difficult to modify it — mostly because I don’t grok ruby. For example, changing the cascading style sheets (CSS) involves a separate compile step using Gulp.

The things I’m looking for, include a short list of criteria:

Criteria	Jekyll	Nue	Hugo
Language	Ruby	Javascript	Rust
Composition	Markdown
Thumbnail	Separate step in Gimp
Comments	Manual link to Mastodon
Migration	None
Menu	Manually via navigation.html

I have no idea how difficult it would be to yank Nue or Hugo around to do what I want. This is just the first step in the process.