gemini://mifuyne.capsule.town/devlog/2024/switching_to

I was using zond, the capsule generator for a while. While it met my most basic needs, I wanted to be able to do more with my capsule(s). While I was looking for another capsule generator, I quickly found a blog post written by someone that was experimenting with making their own capsule using Hugo, the static site generator. I've wanted to use Hugo for a while, but I was pivoting away from making my own site so I didn't have a strong motivation to even try.

And now this capsule is generated by Hugo. I'm glad that I found zond when I did and I was able to get my capsule up and running in a fairly short amount of time. However, I was disappointed by the lack of flexibility in my capsule's structure. Zond was opinionated in that way. It expected one gemlog, but I wanted to have a devlog in the same space as well. After some finangling, I was able to get Hugo to do just that.

I also have it set up so it only exports in gmi files. As I've stated before, I like gemini's minimalist approach, to the point where the visual of the capsule is up to the client and the users. That has not changed.

It's possible the generator might give me some issues as I continue using it. At this point, I'm in "learn as I go" mode. I'll just fix it as they come up 🙂

Maybe. Again, Hugo's flexibility allowed me to do a lot more with it than I could with zond. Hugo's popularity and age also means there's more documentation and more answers out there. That was one of my gripes with zond. Yes, it had documentations but there are times where those documentations don't match up with reality. Likely, it was outdated.

That said, Hugo's immense amount of features and flexibility also means there's that feeling of "I don't know what I don't know." On one hand, it gets frustrating. For example, I thought I had to use {{ .RawContent }} in order to render all the characters as is. Using {{ .Content }} forces HTML encoding. This would have been a problem, especially for the solo TTRPG capsule, because I needed shortcodes to be useable for things like displaying dice roll results and progress tracks. Luckily, there was {{ .RenderShortcodes }}. I'm relieved someone thought of the edge cases and provided this feature!

I guess it really boiled to which one had better support, more time to bake in the oven too. So far, that's Hugo.

Do you want to spend the time required to learn how to wrangle a new site/capsule generator? Or learn where the limits and quirks are? This isn't something I'd recommend if you're tight on time or just want something up and running right NOW. It probably won't require as much time investment as I put into it, but I love learning these things so I was more than happy to!

If you are interested in giving it a try, I put the layout, archetypes, and an example hugo.toml file into a github repo:

It's rather bare on documentation, which I know, seems hypocritical of me after criticizing zond's documentation. I do intend to update it once I have more information to share. I will say this is very much in a pre-alpha state. Be prepared to make lots of adjustments.

That's about all I have to say about this now. It's been a fun learning experience working with Hugo and I hope to stick with it longer. Again, I'm using it to build my solo TTRPG capsule, where I use a bit more of Hugo's features, like pulling from data files. I'll write more about it at a future date!

Switching to Hugo

Aren't you using the wrong tools for this?

Should I use Hugo to make my own capsule?