Wordpress

We started the blog back when we started sailing, the one over at www.sv-karma.com. It seemed like a logical choice because its “easy to use” and its not too expensive. It’s fine, it works. The multitude of buttons seemed nice but it is actually sorta limiting as soon as you try and do something that isn’t obvious. We are happy with the site when you visit it, but working on it is sort of a pain.

The whole interface is very clunky and slow, especially as we are often editing it when we have spotty service. The lack of the ability to do it offline is also a pain as a lot of the downtime we have and would use to write the blogs is without service. We can and have occasionally written offline text files and then just like copied and pasted them into the site later, but it is clunky enough to get the formatting to match how we like it that it can be a bit unmotivating as well.

Lastly, the way it deals with photos is annoying. There is a built in media manager where you upload things and then you can pick them in your posts. The issue is the picture layout in the media manager makes it hard to find what you’ve uploaded which often leads to us duplicating photos. Not ideal when we pay for the storage and it seems to add up quickly.

Current situation

So what I’m doing now is essentially manually copying and pasting everything from the current site into my local new version of the Hugo rebuild. This is pretty tedious and slow going honestly, but its workin’. Plus it’s fun to go back though and see what all we’ve done and some of the nice photos we’ve taken. Goodness though are we behind. There’s nothing about Mexico where we spent like an entire year!

There’s gotta be a better way to do this, but the thing is I think I’ll finish making all the pages before I find it? Oh well.

Hosting

Hosting is a question to which there are more options than I initially realized. I think what I’m going to do is host it exactly the same as this site, that is on a VPS. These are essentially just servers you can rent with static IPs where you can do whatever you want. You login as root to whatever Linux Distro you choose and away you go.

The site is running on an out of date Debian server which I just Rsync the updates I make locally across to with SSH. This is easy, both Heather and I can have the keys to do this from our own machines, and I know how it works. I mean, I did experiment here on this site and got a pretty good system down for it.

Talking about the rebuild though with Evan I was lead onto a new path which may be entirely free? This I’d like, though that being said I think the more robust VPS would then make sense for the Karma site over my personal once which I’m still paying for. You can host Hugo static pages on Github pages as well as Cloudflare for free. I don’t know too much about the limitations of this though and honestly our site has a lot of photos so storage may become an issue at some point?

Conclusion

Once the site is pretty much done locally I’ll go about picking a hosting method and setting it up. I’ll document the process here as it’s bound to be frustrating and obnoxious and non-linear. I may even record my screen as I go to have a live “I can’t build a site” video which would doubtlessly be not entertaining to ever watch again, but hey, whatever.