Introducing my new website
29 May 2023 • ~900 words • ~5 minute read
Well over a year ago, I pulled down my modest, manually written HTML/CSS/JS website from peterkeenan.co.uk and put up a holding page. I have had a lovely, blazing fast NextJS site waiting in the wings, ready to go for that entire time. It was just lacking any substance, because I always ended up tinkering with styling or fun React stuff whenever I went into that code base rather than adding content.1
What's this all about? Why am I bothering?
i: Note-taking
This website is purely for my own benefit: I tend to take lots of notes, but I also typically understand something better when I've gone through a process trying to teach/explain something in some sense.
Advice often given to new devs is to write code in such a way that it will make sense to future you (and future anyone!). I've found this to be really relevant when taking notes during a course or while troubleshooting a problem: sometimes I will return to a note on a topic and be quite lost because the surrounding context might be vague or nonexistant; conversely, I have sometimes found notes to save me a whole load of hassle trying to work something out again.
So the idea here is that I'm going to try disciplining myself to write better notes upfront, and having them out in the open will hopefully motivate me to achieve this.
ii: Habit
I suppose part of this spills over from my brief spell doing research, where it's encouraged to write often, communicate well, and engage widely.2
I imagine most of the content here will be technical notes. But music is a major part of my life, so it's inevitable that I will write about music here too.
Disclaimer!
I do not expect anything here to be of use to anyone but me, and I am definitely not under any illusion that I have anything insightful or useful to offer that isn't found anywhere else!
Time will tell whether I actually end up following through, but the intent is there either way!
Using Hugo going forward
I started playing with Hugo recently as a POC for a different project and it just fitted like a glove. Hugo offers a powerful simplicity, which I think will allow me to continue the sort of tinkering I enjoy, but also not get in the way of just adding content from time to time.
For one thing, I get to write in Emacs Org Mode, rather than Markdown. This is a game changer for me because I been using Org Mode as my primary note taking environment for years, and I'm just a lot happier organising and jotting my thoughts down this way.
I also love that Hugo is written in Go (a language I really rate and like using), using the language's standard library to drive its feature-rich templating, and extending the core aim of Go to be lightweight and performant.3
Also, it's not Javascript! I have nothing against Javascript (I love using React as much as anyone), but don't like that so many sites nowadays are hardly usable without vast numbers of background scripts working away in the background. This is valuable and useful in many commercial websites, I am sure, but not for every website, and definitely not this one.
Minimal is the name of the game here.
Initial 'system' for content discoverability
Hugo has an excellent in-built system surrounding taxonomies, which I plan to use in a simple way. Its two default taxonomies are tags and categories. I can't see any need to add to these (at this stage, anyways). I'm planning on using them and distinguishing between them as such:
Defining categories
Categories will be top-level organisation terms. I plan on using as few of these as possible. At present, I envisage the following:
| category | definition |
|---|---|
| journal | General updates, not focused on any particular theme or discipline |
| notes | Posts which present notes from something I've done or learned |
| music | A catch-all category for all music-related posts |
| coffee | A catch-all category for all coffee-related posts |
Although I plan to keep things simple, I could see categories being used in combination. For example, I might add some coffee notes. We'll see!
Defining tags
Tags will just be specific keywords associated with the content. While categories will be used sparingly, tags will be used quite liberally. Over time, the idea is that connections and related subjects across posts should be easily navigated.
I've twice tried adopting Obsidian for taking notes (I might expand more on Obsidian in future, but I've never stuck to it). I quite like it's back-link/graph functionality, drawing links across the 'vault'. I sort of see tags serving a similar purpose here, especially as this is going to be a main source for notes.
Resource list
Interestingly enough, I recently watched this YouTube video by Tuomo Kankaanpää, which warns developers against coding their own blog, as it distracts from writing posts. He's totally right!
I've had a website in some sense since I bought peterkeenan.co.uk in 2008 or whenever it was, so why not continue :D
See Introduction to Hugo Templating for more information.