The time has come, the Walrus said, to drop my attempts to make Hugo work for me on GitHub Pages. I have googled every proposed solution there is to google, but the workflow suggested always requires more git savvy than I have.
Dropping it for the time being, at least.
I need to spend more time actually writing in one of all these writing spaces I keep creating. Pick one and address an actual readership, with useful information designed to fire their imaginations.
Imagine William S. Burroughs as a typewriter repairman too busy with his day job to write The Naked Lunch. Not that I compare myself with Bill “Lee the Agent” Lee, but the fact is I am much more of a writer of words, cheap words, than a coder.
In college, I flunked Pascal.
And now a living must be made.
Take the case of my Paraguayan Progress Reports – a neat little captain’s log with the aptly named ghostwriter theme – to replace the HubPress blog I began using for the blogging of my technical and Web design endeavors when first looking into GitHub as a hosting resource.
HubPress is still a little funky.
But googling and googling and git command-sequence cutting and pasting au gogo and I still could not get my Hugo site to live on GitHub project pages – which should be easier than org and personal pages, but I can accomplish neither.
A Sudden Urge To Surge
Netlify and Surge actually do serve this site up live, but without rendering the theme.
Just raw HTML. Urgh! And what other options are there? Wercker.
Does it werck? I will have to try it.
But hey, wait a minute! What is that, live on the Web? Well if it is not my Paraguayan Progress Reports with ghostwriter properly rendered as its theme!
The Road to Node
Having finally gotten Node.js and NPM working in Arch Linux, more or less – I still cannot get middleman to work after installing it – all I needed to do was npm install --global surge and surge in my project directory.
Designate public as the build directory, change the randomly generated domain name – somatic-cheesebread or something – to gringolalia and then navigate to https://gringolalia.surge.sh.
This is great. It was worth making that huge list of things to try out and crossing them off one by one.
What still puzzles me, though, is why my PPR will not deploy properly to my local Apache server.
As in cp -r public /srv/http/hugo and then fiddle with chown and chmod.
Wherever Hugo, I Go
So that settles that for now.
It ain’t pretty but it loads up in my browser and I can e-mail the URL to you and that is something.
There is still hope that the very simple advice given by Maria Rivas will bear fruit.
Meanwhile I can at least continue to develop and present Hugo projects fairly easily as I start moving into the area of theme adaptations and authoring.
This is something I would like to get reasonably good at over the next year.
In my spare time from writing my money laundering novel set in Paraguay and Uruguay, of course. Inspired by Narcos, whose second season we just took in during two marathon Netflix sessions.
I am after all something of a connoisseur of typography and layout. I studied medieval paleography and incunabula for my doctorate.
I was reading Tufte when the youth of today were still on Doctor Suess. I used to copyedit Jakob Nielsen’s usability column in the late, lamented Internet World. The Penton publication, not the Swedish mag of the same title.
Yes, all of this is a little off my established career path, but then there is little English-language editorial work in Sambodia. Unlike New York where I always found work.
(Get back. Get back. Get back to where you once belonged.)
And so here I am, planning to create a portfolio of sites under this root server named after the bairros of São Paulo. Itaim-Bibi. Paraísopolis. Vila-Madda. Anhangambaú. Brooklin Novo. Avenida Berrini. Marginal Tietê. Hugo will not entirely do go.
But the surge solution will serve for now.