Converting from ikiwiki to hugo
Static web sites are great - but ikiwiki was too slow
About 4 years ago I attempted to get off of blogger and onto some more modern, better looking, useful blogging technology. In the end I chose ikiwiki - which appeared to meet most of my needs…
I then documented, step by step, what I needed to do in order to achieve each goal - and I finally did get something that was quite nice, making the edit step truly pleasant and fast - except for one, rather major thing -
Ikiwiki was so slow as to make the publish step more painful than using blogger. I mean, it would take 10 seconds to publish stuff.
And worse, later on, my highly customized ikiwiki code broke, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. And then, I got involved in the bufferbloat project and had to work in textile (which I hated), and email (which I liked) - and I stopped blogging entirely.
My canon rotted. A lot of my emails would have benefited from being more blog/web like. Not having a publishing tool handy that would “do the right thing” has been a serious demotivator.
So finally, I got up off my ass and evaluated some new tools. I love org-mode - but it just needs too much love to keep running all the time, and it’s interface to html is nowhere near as good as it’s interface to TeX. I really need something that looks more like markdown and converting between url formats is a PITA.
ikiwiki - still too damn slow.
jeckyll: Gotta admit, I was really tempted by jeckyll - but it was written in python and still too darn slow.
Then someone pointed me at hugo.
Ahh… finally - a truly compiled language. The 42 blog posts here render in under 50ms. ikiwiki was measured in 10s of seconds.
It is under heavy development and thus far I still have a few features left to add, which were pretty much the same features as I’d had to add to ikiwiki:
- heli.gif as the icon
- MathJax
- Syntax Highlighting
- Sidebar
- Disquis
- Imagery
- Import of Postcards from the bleeding edge
The beauty of this is that I blogged most of the process of getting ikiwiki to do what I wanted, and in converting those old blog entries to hugo, I am learning each special bit of syntactic sugar needed to do what I eventually managed to make ikiwiki do.
I am not sure if I will stick with hugo, jeckll is a fallback, but I am pretty sure the work I am sinking in now will pay off.
Find me elsewhere.
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space