Hugo does not Spark Joy

I haven't been writing much in the last couple of months. A large part of that is due to life circumstances, but a not-insignificant part of that comes from the site as it is not sparking joy. When I started with Version 3 a couple of years ago, the idea was to have a static, locally-generated site completely under my control, that I could use to experiment with ideas about what I wanted the site to be. I wanted to collect my writings on other platforms, but also experiment with what a static site could be. In addition to writing standard blog posts, could I also have a Twitter-like stream of short posts? Could I use it to collect interesting snippets like I would with a tumblelog? How about a linkblog like Daring Fireball.

Unfortunately, Hugo, the static site generator at the heart of the site, doesn't seem conducive to the kind of experimentation I want to do. While it's great for a purely static site, or even a typical blog, once I started to push beyond that I started to run into limitations. The biggest issue is that Hugo's templates are just too limiting. Firstly, the way Hugo resolves which template to use in any situation is rather complicated, requiring me to put templates with non-obvious names in non-obvious places. Second, the templating language itself is an issue. Hugo is written in Go, but the templates themselves are not Go. Instead, Hugo exposes a set of functions that are useful in writing templates. There are a lot of them, but if you want some kind of template transformation that isn't supported, you're out of luck (unless you want to write a Hugo plug-in, which I haven't looked into). I'm sure that with time and effort I could have overcome both these issues, but there is something about using Hugo that just feels rigid, it does not spark joy.

So where do I go from here? I still want to experiment with the site in the ways that I mentioned, but I want to do it with a platform that is more flexible and amenable to such experimentation. One day I will get around to writing my own (some kind of Racket derivative). But for now I still want to work on the site itself, rather than the system building it. Thankfully for me, there seems to be a system out there that splits the difference: Lume.

Lume is also a static site generator, but running on Deno (a JavaScript engine). I think I first found out about it from Xe Iaso, but it's been around for a couple of years. It seems to have a bunch of advantages over Hugo. Layouts are much simpler to resolve. Pages can be written in a variety of formats, including JavaScript, meaning that if Lume doesn't support the kind of functionality I want, I can just write it in a page. Lume also lets you keep raw data in a variety of formats and then render them into a page. This seems like something that would come in handy if I want to add things like movie ratings that don't need a whole page to themselves. I think that their handling of tags is simpler and more intuitive than Hugo's, but it might be a bit too simple. We'll find out. Finally, it seems straightforward to write plugins which might be something I end up doing.

I've started recreating the site in Lume, using their default Vento templates. I'm taking this opportunity to also cleanup the templates and their associated CSS. In particular, I want to make sure that I'm properly using CSS Grids rather the pile of hacks I used previously to get things to look the way I wanted to. I'm hoping that most of the posts themselves will go through without issue, since they were all Markdown to begin with. I'm not sure if I want to keep the Lume version as version 3 or as version 4. I'm tempted to make a fresh start as it's a big change, but also feeling like I didn't actually use version 3 for anything. We'll see how I feel once the porting is done.