Zuckerbude

not your average tech/non-tech blog - since 2007

Zuckerbude 3.0

December 18, 2020 Technical Ben Zucker

The whole website has been reworked. Why? Because I can. After a very long time it is now time to say goodbye to Wordpress and say hello to Hugo.

What is Hugo?

Hugo is “The world’s fastest framework for building websites”. You can learn more here.

Simplified it takes your input files, which are formatted using the Markdown syntax, and a template and creates a ready to upload website from that.

There is no web interface or fancy WYSIWYG-editor thing. You can use any text editor, preferably one with syntax highlight or even a small IDE like VScode.

Visual Studio Code editing my website

Visual Studio Code editing my website

After editing the changes can be previewed locally by using

hugo server --disableFastRender --ignoreCache

which will provide a http server that serves the website on localhost. Once satisfied the output of the public folder is pushed to the webserver and the changes are live immediately.

Why Hugo?

The idea to use Hugo came rather incidental while watching a discussion at the Fosshost (shoutout to their services!) IRC channel about building a small website to publish the progress of deploying their ARM based server farm across the globe. When the name Hugo dropped this made me curious as I never heard from it before. So I did some research and got excited. It seems it can do most of the things I need but in a WAY more compact way than Wordpress ever could.

Actually I though the process of converting the website into a whole new system would take way longer and I already planned to spent a few days of my upcoming holidays to this task. Fortunately I could rather quick get used to it and with a bit of help of some cheat sheets for Markdown and Hugo things became easy. Exporting the existing data also was less of a pain that I was expecting. A Wordpress to Hugo export plugin provided me with a downloadable zip file everything preprocessed and converted to .md files. Of course postprocessing was mandatory for every article but even just getting the header part of every file prepared helped a lot.

The past and the future

In more than thirteen years of existence zuckerbude.org was undergoing quite some changes this is now the third complete overhaul. 2007 the first version based on Wordpress 2 came live. A blast from the past screenshot can be marveled at What why?.

I cannot remember when the switchover to Zuckerbude 2.0 happened but I think it must have been somewhen around January 2017.

Zuckerbude 2.0

Zuckerbude 2.0

Future plans are straightforward. Continue adding older posts and find a way to make hyperlinks within the text more obvious. Probably some CSS thingy. I will figure this out sooner or later.