Blogs

I’ve been looking at extending the capabilities of my Hugo sites - yes, plural, but more on that later - and the three needs I have and the solutions I’m testing are here, but I’ll do a full post on them once I’ve had some more real world experience with them. A basic gallery and lightbox function - I went with Photoswipe. A search function - I went with Pagefind. A basic comments system - I’m now testing Giscus. A basic page view system - I’m testing GoatCounter. I’ve also added reading time and word counts to posts. Photoswipe Photoswipe adds a configurable but powerful set of image tools, both for galleries and lightboxes. It’s open source and seems well supported. ...

Brightblack has been on the Hugo static site generator for quite a while now - almost three years in fact - and I’d been thinking of putting a new coat of paint on the place for a few months, but I’d been promising myself to put any brightblack time into content and not playing with tooling. However, an actual problem has forced me to make the change. Newer builds of Hugo had deprecated some references around Google Analytics, which was breaking my build. I tried updating the theme but to no avail, I could have hacked the theme to make it work, or rolled Hugo back and I even looked for a quick alternate theme I’d tested years ago, but to install an update I’d have needed to get into the nuts and bolts of the git index. ...

Windows 11 has been out for over 2 years now (since October 2021) and I’ve not felt much impetus to move; there’s some nice features (tabbed file browsers etc.), but there’s potential downsides, and that’s before we get into the issue of telemetry. However, all that aside, I have updated my Windows 10 box to Windows 11. Despite all of the above, why? Well I expect to update some family PCs and I want to guinea-pig it first, see what’s weird, see if anyting doesn’t work. ...

Long story short, but I learned last week (and a couple of years or so after the fact) that the openSSH team have advised people to move away from scp (secure copy) towards SFTP (SSH/Secure file transfer protocol) and rsync. sftp should also not be confused with ftps - that’s completely different, and not secure. I’ve used scp a little over the last few years, mainly for one-off copies between my Ubuntu server and a couple of Pis I have, but any normal file copy I do I’ve long used rsync (or Robocopy sometimes from the Windows box). sftp is quite nice to use, allowing simple local and remove directory traversal so it’s certainly a more usable option too! ...

I’ve been doing a few fairly minor changes behind the scenes here on brightblack.net, and hopefully this has been completely transparent to everyone else. Switched to the main config file to hugo.toml instead of config.toml, which is now recommended by Hugo themselves. Switched the content front matter to be yaml instead of toml. This was purely for me since I’m more used to yaml. I did this with Hugo’s own convert tool, which was simple and easy. Let me know if you see any strangeness because of this!