The obligatory first post in a new platform

As I start packing up to leave the wonderful Newington College, where I’ve been for the past 7½ years, I thought it perhaps best to try another website platform.

I’ve owned the domain name for about two decades and have pretty much failed at keeping it fresh and useful.

Over time, the site has been:

  • A truly static site
  • A PHP monstrosity
  • A couple of types of early ruby apps - mostly Sinatra
  • A Tumblr feed (tumblog?)
  • A Jekyll monstrosity (my fault, not Jekyll’s)
  • A Ghost blog

This time around I’m having a crack at using Hugo… and I have to say, I’m rather loving it.

Some huge benefits so far:

  1. It’s blazingly fast
  2. It has to be the simplest possible installer (brew install hugo).
  3. It happens to be golang, but you’d never know it… anything deeply technical seems to be well abstracted away
  4. The docs are comprehensive and easy
  5. Most of the time I haven’t needed the docs – it just does things sensibly, with the right blend of ‘convention over configuration

I’ve deleted all the old posts… some were going back a LONG way… and most were the sort of stuff I thought useful back when I was using Tumblr. Right now they seem like drivel.

Here’s hoping that my move to Instructure in the new year will prompt a little more ongoing reflection…