Welcome to the new 80%!
I’ve rewritten my ancient blog on top of Hugo using Bootstrap and Google Fonts. The whole thing is hosted on GitHub if you want to check out the source.
For headlines, I’m using Economica. I picked it because it is narrow and I tend to write long headlines. The body text is Lora. I like a nice Serif font for the body text and it has a bit of style while still being very readable. Code is in Roboto Mono and the Logo and Navigation is in Coda.
I’m not in love with the color theme I have now (dark gray background with red and blue highlights) but it’ll do for now. I played with some CSS gradients to show a preview on the main index page. I’m still not sure – it may be a little too cute.
I’ve done the work of importing my old blog posts and making Hugo create compatible URLs. My original system used XML files for each day so I wrote a short Go program to convert from the XML to something Hugo can consume (markdown files with a JSON header). I had to introduce a verbatim HTML shortcode to make Hugo pass through the HTML from the old blog directly.
The other tricky thing was to generate a page per day instead of a page per post for these old posts. Rolling things up on a daily basis was the way things were done back when I started the blog in January 2003. Doing this daily roll up used the taxonomy feature of Hugo where the taxonomy was “archive” and the term was the day. This was easy to generate from the Go conversion program.
I’m hosting this on GCE under Docker and NGINX. I’m going to write up a post on how I’m doing that and automatically syncing it to the git repro on each submit.
Now that I have it all set up, we’ll see if I actually have anything to say…