I have not been very active on this tech blog the last 18 months :-(

I think one of the most probable causes is that the writing using plain text markdown files and generating the static website using some commands is too cumbersome.

While I still want to stick with the simplicity and security of having a static-generated website, I have started looking at more user-friendly alternatives to pelican, starting with it’s fork Flamingo.

The new tool should allow an easier workflow, from creating a new post down to uploading the newly generated pages. And I wanted to keep the nice dark & greenish theme for the rendered pages.

Then I had a look at Publii, which looks like an offline Wordpress clone, with a Wysiswyg interface for writing the posts, generating and uploading the site. It however lacks a great collection of themes.

Jekyll seemed to be a sound alternative, but it didn’t install smoothly on my arch linux machine (some dependencies were missing).

And Gatsby, while looking pretty powerful, seemed a bit overkill for just a small blog.

I ended up using Hugo with the hugo-dusky-neon-potato theme and some adaptions to make it look like the previous one.

Still, the whole workflow would be command-line based, with commands to start a local webserver for preview, and commands to generate the code :-( The solution was to delegate the GUI and the automation part to VSCode with the (modified) Hugofy extension !

In the end the workflow looks like this :

• Start vscode, open the blog workspace
• Ctrl-Shift-P to run Hugofy: Start server (which not only starts the hugo server but also opens the website in the browser)
• Ctrl-Shift-P to run Hugofy: New Post
• Write the post’s content
• Ctrl-Shift-P to run Hugofy: Build

The final step to upload the generated content to my webserver remains a command-line task - which can be easily scripted like described here