Switching to Substack

Losing patience with GitHub

You may have figured out that I am now on Substack. This is my first post as a native Substack publisher and previously I had been trying to run my own blog using the Hugo framework, a GitHub repository, and Cloudflare pages. It’s quite complicated, despite what the nerds say. I got a basic blog working but it wasn’t what I wanted and was more than a little bit painful to write new content. Worst, I needed an actual computer with command line hooked up to git in order to make it work.

Ultimately, that was what made me switch. I was trying to change the font and had Claude suggest some simple edits to the CSS file. But the issue (as far as I can tell) ended up being that whatever edits I made to the CSS didn’t get saved to GitHub, and hence not actually published, because I’d cloned the GitHub repository of the theme (aptly named “Plainwhite”) and because it was owned by someone else and I don’t have permission to edit that repo, nothing would change in my larger repository.

I’m entirely confident that there is a way to fix this, and I tried a couple of things — changing the name of the theme to “new” and saving it as part of my own repository was the best idea I could come up with — but it wouldn’t build from there and threw constant errors.

So here we are on Substack with the same URL as before. And now I also have an iPhone app for quick posts, which I’m using to write this in fact. And smart quotes! Yay! And a nicer font! I was also not able to figure out how to add pictures to Hugo, but now it’s dead simple.

Ok, back to learning.