From Ikiwiki to Hugo

Back in the days of Etch, I converted this blog from Drupal to ikiwiki. I remember being very excited about this brand new concept of static web sites derived from content stored in a version control system.

And now over a decade later I’ve moved to hugo.

I feel some loyalty to ikiwiki and Joey Hess for opening my eyes to the static web site concept. But ultimately I grew tired of splitting my time and energy between learning ikiwiki and hugo, which has been my tool of choice for new projects. When I started getting strange emails that I suspect had something to do with spammers filling out ikiwiki’s commenting registration system, I choose to invest my time in switching to hugo over debugging and really understanding how ikiwiki handles user registration.

I carefully reviewed anarcat’s blog on converting from ikiwiki to hugo and learned about a lot of ikiwiki features I am not using. Wow, it’s times like these that I’m glad I keep it really simple. Based on the various ikiwiki2hugo python scripts I studied, I eventually wrote a far simpler one tailored to my needs.

Also, in what could only be called a desperate act of procrastination combined with a touch of self-hatred (it’s been a rough week) I rejected all the commenting options available to me and choose to implement my own in PHP.

What?!?! Why would anyone do such a thing?

I refer you to my previous sentence about desperate procrastination. And also… I know it’s fashionable to hate PHP, but honestly as the first programming language I learned, there is something comforting and familiar about it. And, on a more objective level, I can deploy it easily to just about any hosting provider in the world. I don’t have to maintain a unicorn service or a nodejs service and make special configuration entries in my web configuration. All I have to do is upload the php files and I’m done.

Well, I’m sure I’ll regret this decision.

Special thanks to Alexander Bilz for the anatole hugo theme. I choose it via a nearly random click to avoid the rabbit hole of choosing a theme. And, by luck, it has turned out quite well. I only had to override the commento partial theme page to hijack it for my own commenting system’s use.