Hugo on East of the Sun, West of the Moon

RSS feed fix

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Looks may be deceiving

When I set up a static website my focus around the RSS feed was that I wanted to have the full content, so once I had that, I moved on.

Today I noticed that the links back to the posts in the RSS feed (or the link for the site itself) didn't actually work, they were missing the https://is-here.com/ prefix. 🤔

Thankfully this was a simple fix

All that was missing was a baseURL parameter in my config.yaml file. It was there originally, but it got lost when I migrated from the S3 bucket to statichost.eu and revamped my config.yaml file.

Running the local hugo preview with --baseURL http://localhost:1313/ to override that, and all is well again in this part of the world.

Moving to Europe

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shifting things around

For reasons, I am slowly but surely moving most of my online resources to European providers. This has meant a journey of discovery, finding suitable ones for:

Domain registration
DNS hosting
Some place for a few static (placeholder) websites
Virtual servers of some kind
Object storage or something similar
Git repository hosting

Resources that helped

Most of my information has come from european-alternatives.eu. Some test accounts were needed here and there because it isn't necessarily obvious how well they may cooperate with automation tools like Terraform and how much click-ops will be required, and how well does their web UI work in that case.

Obstacles I encountered

There were some hiccups with getting the European companies to play nice with my US credit cards.

One disappointment was because the company (Infomaniak 🇨🇭) seems to be incapable of sending SMS to US phone numbers. Pity, because they looked promising otherwise.

Another Nope was finding out that OVH 🇫🇷 pushes you to OVH US if you're in the US or Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of OVH Group, defeating the purpose of going with European companies.

Choices/solutions

Service	My Pick	Based in
Domain registration	https://www.openprovider.com/	🇳🇱
DNS	https://desec.io/	🇩🇪
Static websites	https://www.statichost.eu/	🇸🇪
Git repository hosting	https://codeberg.org/	🇩🇪

Of these, statichost.eu was a nice find, because it will let you point to a git repository (public or private), and run with it, with support for either fully static content, or one of several static site generators, and even pick a specific version to avoid surprises.

Still to do

That leaves virtual servers, for my self-hosted mail-server and the one-person-Mastodon instance. Most likely I'll pick one of UpCloud (🇫🇮) or Scaleway (🇫🇷), after sitting down again to do a side-by-side comparison.

For object storage Scaleway seems to have a reasonably priced solution, but that also needs another look.

Hello again, world?

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From Twitter to Mastodon

For many years Twitter was my main social media account. My Facebook account has not been visited in many months and Instagram has mostly been kept alive to follow some friends and family's postings. Though I originally did post from time to time, the last few years it had turned mostly into a read-only account.

Then last year around the time of the change in ownership, I gave up on it and began an effort to migrate my network to Mastodon or, more accurately the Fediverse. Initially at mastodon.social, the flagship server for the Mastodon software, with an account that I had created in May 2022 but began using in earnest in October. Later I migrated to an account on a personal server.

Starting to feel an itch

As I was posting on my Mastodon account, I regularly found myself writing more than was going to fit in the space of the default 500 characters. Sure I could change that default (although it is a little bit more work than just changing a configuration file entry), but that felt wrong. To me, the fact that I was bumping against that ceiling suggested I was looking for a different medium for those posts.

Static Site Generator to the rescue

While I did feel the itch to write some longer form things, the idea of running (potentially vulnerable) infrastructure for this that would need to be maintained did not appeal to me.

Comes along Hugo (docs, themes, etc at the official website) which comes with a generous set of themes that can be tweaked as needed, allows me to write posts and other pages in Org Mode syntax, and has built-in support for deploying its output into an AWS S3 bucket.

More details on the project page.

Website

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active in its current form since November 2023 and its current location since March 2025.

What

My personal website.

Where

Right here.

Content

Everything on here has been generated once by a so-called SSG and then dropped in place.

The content is generated with Hugo. I picked the Ananke theme, and made some minor modifications:

Modified the default Hugo RSS template (layouts/_default/rss.xml):
- Change the feed to include full posts instead of just the summary
- Add <category> tag(s)
Copied and modified the default single (post/project) page (layouts/_default/single.html):
- Include an optional "Updated …" bit after the original post date
- Move the context menu (with the table of contents and related posts) before the content, which places it to the left of the text, or at the top of page instead of at the bottom in a small screen situation
Copied and adapted the main page (layouts/index.html) just to make the text there not be centered.
Copied and adapted the footer (layouts/partials/site-footer.html) just so I could make the copyright years be a range instead of just the current year. I tried to put the beginning of the range in the copyright configuration setting but then that ended up looking funny in the RSS source

Beyond that, I've left the theme as-is and I'm taking advantage of its (and Hugo's) features.

Hosting

Until March 2025 the static site was hosted in an AWS S3 bucket, made available through a Cloudfront distribution to make it available via https.

At that point, I moved it to statichost.eu, which specializes in hosting SSGs, directly from Git repositories, and hosting it with http and https.

Keeping up with the Joneses?

As so often happens, I looked away for one minute (alright, closer to 4-5 months) and the version of Hugo that I get when I do a fresh install (from Brew) is a bit different than what I started with, and that is going to break some things.

To give myself a stable work environment and breathing space I decided to run the hugo command inside a quick'n'dirty container:

The Dockerfile

  FROM cibuilds/hugo:0.119.0

  EXPOSE 1313

A super simple Makefile

  hugo-docker:
          docker build --tag myhugo .

  server-beta:
          docker-helper server --bind 0.0.0.0 --environment beta

  server-live:
          ./docker-helper server --bind 0.0.0.0 --environment live

  deploy-beta:
          ./docker-helper --environment beta && ./docker-helper deploy --environment beta

  deploy-live:
          ./docker-helper --environment live && ./docker-helper deploy --environment live

And a shell script to glue it all together:
```
  #!/bin/sh

  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
      echo "Usage: $0 <hugo-arguments>" 1>&2
      exit 1
  fi

  DIR=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
  docker run -v $HOME/.aws:/home/circleci/.aws -v $DIR:$DIR -p 1313:1313 -w $(pwd) -it myhugo hugo $*
```
That script fires up the container with only the current Git repo exposed within the container, and starting off at the current working directory as well, then running the hugo version that I grabbed. It also shares ~/.aws for the deployment steps.

Now I can run a command like this and I can sanity check that the site is going to look ok with that particular version, and then later figure out what needs to be fixed as I nudge the version along at my own pace:

make server-beta

And then deploy when I'm happy:

make deploy-live

Noting that now that I've moved to statichost.eu the deploy-* targets are obsolete, but it's still useful to test locally with server-*.