June ProgBlog #2: The Great Blogsite Migration Part 2

• webmonkeying
• AEfter Ragnarok

Part 1 happened over the course of weeks or months a couple of decades ago when I migrated to Drupal from livejournal (I didn’t really note how long it took partly because I wasn’t interested at the time and mostly because I was trying to get through that cringey era as quickly as possible).

Part 2 started a few months ago after I finally (after way too long because I am nothing if not unreasonably stubborn) accepted the fact that I’ve been really, really struggling to keep on top of Drupal updates alongside everything else. By stupid dumb luck I saw hugo mentioned in an article on one of my feeds (the author was migrating their site from Drupal 6 to hugo from memory) and went and had a look.

And as it looked more fyn-friendly than jamstack (which I tried some years back and hated) I thought I’d give it a shot.

And got Sprat to make me a new site skin to commemorate.

Okay actually I asked her to make me a new skin anyway as I was planning on upgrading to Drupal 10 and while I still love the skin that she made originally when I first made technonaturalist on Drupal 5-7 (I can’t remember which Drupal I started out with but it was one of those), she eventually got around to it and I used it for the hugo experiment.

She did an amazing job given that the only thing I gave her to work with was along the lines of “big tree with circuits…and light and dark modes” and after one of the designs she showed me contained mushrooms “DEFINITELY GLOWING SHROOMIES”.

I could cope with the text based workflow (as if I have never done it before) for reduced maintenance overhead so decided to make the switch.

And so we have gone from this

to this

and it also comes in night mode.

Which one you’ve got depends on what your system/browser is set to.

At this stage I’m not sure if the tag cloud is going to stay as it’s pretty big and if it is, will be one of the blocks that mysteriously disappears on small screens because it’s pretty big. I was just happy that I managed to work out how to do it.

Stuff I still need to do

• proper responsiveness: not all the breakpoints are in yet, and I don’t yet have a design for small screens
• comments: CMSs really make up for the maintenance times by at least being all in one packages. I have to cobble something on and I’m currently trying to decide between two commenting systems (Comentario and Remark42, currently leaning towards the former)
• external link marker: theoretically relatively easy to do I’m just lazy

Stuff I’m not going to do

• fixing alt tags: I must have gotten super lazy uploading images with Drupal as I’ve been noticing that a lot of the images are missing or have the most useless alt text (at some point Drupal started automatically inserting the file name into the alt text if I didn’t provide any, but also at some other point it started renaming everything I uploaded as “image-[incrementing number]” and I still don’t know which setting I toggled for that). I did fix some of them if I wasn’t too lazy or in a hurry but most of them have been left as is due to internal conflicts I was having about whether or not I should be fixing them or leaving them as is for “historical” reasons
• fixing tagging: I was better on some days than others and definitely better in more recent posts, and as above I did fix some of them on the way through depending on whether or not I was feeling conflicted about whether I should be retroactively fixing them or leaving them for “historical” reasons
• fixing the double watermarking: I started watermarking the blog images in Obsidian (where I draft blog posts) after I broke the watermarking in Drupal (I found out when that happened as I was migrating the posts but still haven’t figured out why) and ran them over the only copies of the screenies I was taking (didn’t save the original version of the screenies as they weren’t that important and were purely for blog posts) and obviously hugo cann do automatic watermarking

Stuff I’m meant to be doing

The migration post was actually a separate thing until I woke up this morning and after migrating a couple more posts, noticed that there were six left, so I decided to push through and roll it into the progblog.

Aside from a break where we went out to dinner with my parents who are up for a holiday and a few stints of laundry accompanied by much complaining about how long it takes to dry in this weather, most of the rest of the day was spent on this.

I still hate the wing membranes. There’s one membrane and 2.5 fingers to go.

I’m currently not sure how I’m going to handle the horn crests. I should theoretically be able to just add it on to the head like I did before, and then maybe I just leave stems for the horns and hope that I can get enough multires levels to sculpt the gems as from prior experience modelling the gems individually kinda sucks.

But that’s also an option I’ll have to keep in mind in case I have to do it again.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License