Howdy friends! I’m happy to announce today that I am launching a rebuilt https://www.chicks.net/ . Hopefully you can already see the difference.

It has been a long time.

This is the first redesign in a very long time. Most of the changes over the last decade have been minor. Going back further gets us before git to September 2004 in the wayback machine and we can see that the old design lasted for 20 years.

Going back even further we can see examples like Dec 1996 where the page was just lists of links to sites that my consulting company FINI was hosting.

There are also lots of examples in those years of the site just sending back a test page or the default Apache page. I’m not sure why we were so unreliable for that time period.

Hugo

The big news is that I’ve switched the site over to Hugo. Now all of the HTML/CSS you see has been generated by Hugo and the PaperMod theme.

I’ve tried a few Hugo projects in the past and I’ve often given up in frustration with how delicate the ecosystem is and how hard it is to keep it working. This time I ran into some of that same irritation with confusing error messages, but I was able to get past all of them.

I attribute this success to two factors. One is that I was wiser in my choice of themes. Choosing technology based on popularity often does not lead to the best results, but in this case I wanted the best chance of someone else already running into the problem and documenting the answer. So going with PaperMod that has the most stars on github seemed worth a shot. Switching to another theme in hugo should be relatively easy, so, again, it was worth a try.

The other factor for my success is regular check points in git. On more than one occassion I backed out changes that I was trying to get back to a known working state. Once any progress was made, I added another commit to my branch so I had another checkpoint to go back to. Getting nice diffs after trying something new in hugo also helped build confidance that it was working as desired.

I’m still learning hugo, but this part of the project is working well enough that I can move onto other areas to focus on.

More content

The biggest area that I’m going to put more time into is continuing to repurpose content from other sites into my blog. For now I’ve reworked my linked-in shares and youtube videos into blog entries. This was one of the major goals for upgrading the platform for the site and I’m pleased with how well this has gone.

Next will be google+. I might also cull emails and Facebook at some point. I did some article-style stuff for FINI decades ago and I’d like to get that in the archive someday too.

I’ve got a name for this idea of repurposing content, but I’m going to save that for a blog post just on that topic.

Try automation with dagger

The next big piece of automation I want to do for the site is to have the HTML get automatically generated in a github action. There are a variety of great guides out there for doing that, but I’m planning on trying this with dagger. One of my colleagues at Tubi recommended dagger to help rewrite some ansible-based projects. It looks like an interesting way to accomplish this so I’m going to give it a try on my own project. I found one post where someone had managed to do this. Maybe I’ll be the second.

More to come

Hopefully this won’t be my last blog post originating on my own platform. I’ve got a lot of ideas for blog articles or youtube videos. Stay tuned.