Notes from the Laboratory: April 2022

I am trying this new “thing” of “reporting” what I was up to in a certain time period this year, and monthly reviews just sound like something normal people would do. So bear with me while I am typing up this report.

• Focus: The focus thing stays a point of work ;) I still tend to find distraction in issues and ideas. But at least I could put those ideas to good work this month.

• Header tags and social media tags: For a while now I was working on a module that creates all the header tags a website could possibly need. After some cleaning up and fine tuning it’s finally ready to be released as a proper module. In it’s wake we have two other modules that take care of “everything social” and “everything image” on my websites.

• kollitsch.de(v): Adding a V to the DE! Long story short: People kept asking me why I am writing English on a weblog in a .de-domain. It appears ;) that being German is not a reason enough for this and clearly having a German domain name will probably make “easy” SEO harder. No target audience in Germany and no target language with German. So I bit in the sour cherry and decided to donate a v to the de.

  I also got out the screwdriver and moved to a Cloudflare to Netlify based hosting setup, which results in a very much speedier delivery of the pages.

  All .de links are properly forwarded to their .dev equivalents and the juice should flow in the proper direction.

  Nuff said.

• Cooking: I experimented with chicken soup this month. Like it. Now on to wraps ;)

• GoHugo: Let’s quote Victor Hugo: “Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.” - After more than 4 years of trying to make GoHugo better I realised that my attempts to help were neither appreciated nor in any way helping the project going forward.

  

  Image via xkcd.

  I think that the term “open source” means not much when the only deciding factor of new features is a single developer, when the documentation of a product is attrocious at best and when one receives a response like the following to criticism:

  Have you understood my irritation coming from me spending 10 hours of my vacation time to implement basic return support in partials, yet you expect me to spend 100 hours to get it in line with your expectations?

  People that spend their vacation time on improving open source projects without any merit are prone to ending up as people who in a fit of rage or anger take out “that one package, that everyone is using”. Hobbyists need to be more than that.

  I am not going to wait for this soon to be expected meltdown, I am also not complaining. I don’t think complaining will help GoHugo forward. I tried many times over the past years. I think the only thing that would help it become a stable usable open source program that is adaptable by the “well-versed Go nerd” as well as the “noob” would be a proper Project Management and Community Management, and both won’t come into existence any time soon.

  Everything that GoHugo has going for itself is speed. And that alone won’t save the spot on top of the Olymp.

  Releases that noisily advertise features are basically bug fixes for user-cases that nobody thought of before. Try searching for “semver” on the forum and read the responses of the developer.

  All I need for the projects in my care (which, in the end, is all that counts for me) is a “take x and make it into y, using my z” - as in take my markdown content and create a static website from it using my theme. Which is not that much of an accomplishment. Speed is nice, but having features added and a non-toxic community around the product has the same amount of importance as speed, if not more.

  I love Hugo. Really do. But I don’t want to spend anymore time on it. I can realise whatever I want with it. Some features like “content via data files” would have been nice. But a feature that is noted for over four years as “yeah, well, maybe one day” is still not a feature.

  So I started to check what other SSG’s are out there and currently am trying out several of them.

  I stopped responding and helping on the GoHugo forum for about 4 weeks now. The initial withdrawal symptoms are gone. There were two or three posts that resulted in really wrong answers and discussions that I would have really liked to put right, because the people that asked these questions deserved a proper solution, but I withheld myself from them too.

  Well. Bye, forum.

• All the other stuff: As always there was a lot of things that I just ignored or let slide. That’s life. I guess.