Welcome to the new blog for 2021! It’s powered by Hugo and I’ve selected the Geekblog theme to power it. This handily matches the Geekdoc theme to power my separated out project documentation. I did this because my blog was rapidy becoming a series of release annoucements and started to take away from my ramblings. It also opens up the possibility of allowing contributors to the project documentation while keeping my blog to me.

Well, don’t get me wrong, vuepress is a great product for what it is. I generally like the Vue.js framework over the others. If you recall, I changed from Grav to vuepress back at the start of last year

However, the vuepress blog plugin is not really that easy to setup, configure and get going. It’s also not easy to maintain when the tree of plugins breaks. That’s the thing with complex stuff - one small part breaks and it all falls down.

And this is the reason - a plugin the plugin used broke. It didn’t upgrade. My fault for using NetBSD I know. I did sort of manage to get it working, but the site on my mobile phone showed the desktop view which made me mad. Tried to upgrade it, no dice. A this point, I figured I should look around and see if there’s anything easier and voila. Here we are.

Well, unlike vuepress, Hugo is in pkgsrc which makes it a snap to install on NetBSD. Yes, there is sometimes a large lag between updates in pkgsrc to Hugo which is why I ruled it out when I changed to vuepress a few years ago as the pkgsrc version was too old for the themes I wanted. Technically this was because the pkgsrc golang infrastructure was quite new and not up to it I think.

It’s also a lot faster to build the site on my server, by several orders of magnitude. Speed is always important.

I’m an engineer! It’s never done, it can always be improved! There are some things I don’t like about Geekblog and Geekdoc. Both seem to get frequent changes, so hopefully they can be resolved soon. The Projects and About Me links are temporary as they don’t belong in the tag cloud.

I also need to edit my old blog posts and fix the links where I can. If you see a broken link, please let me know!

Sadly, I seem to have lost a lot of pictures from Grav. I thought I had them all backed up, but I’ve since re-used the disk. Also, a lot date to before I used a smart phone to take pictures which are now auto magically backed up to the cloud. A real shame, good memories lost.