Back in the mists of time (oh, say, 2003-2010), I was a semi-prolific blogger. I had a reasonably public presence as an open source programmer and needed a way to announce new releases of software, but also to comment on interesting things that I learned or just to rant or vent.

Over time, the amount of time that I spent on public non-work computer work shrank until there was really no point in updating a blog, and indeed not really even any time to keep it up to date and running. For a while I was directly managing ~16 people in two teams at work, and the last thing I wanted to do when I finally got away from work was to argue with people over the Internet for free.

Eventually I’d finally had one emergency Rails security update too many and turned my blog down. I figured I’d get back to fix it in a month or two.

I don’t even remember what year that was now.

Over the past year, I’ve had an increasing number of things that I want to share on the Internet, for the general use of whoever shows up searching for them. Things that don’t fit well into Facebook, or Google+ (RIP), or onto specific forums. So I decided to see what it’d take to make my blog work again.

I’d dreamed for years of spending a month or so writing code for it in Go; there are a few specific things that I’d love to implement that I haven’t seen done before, which I think could prove to be very interesting and useful to the 3 people left who still run their own blog sites.

So, for now, I’m giving Hugo a shot. It’s a a Go-based content management engine. It doesn’t have a database, it doesn’t do comments, it just reads content out of a directory and then writes out a pile of HTML files that can be served via a normal web server. It includes a couple plugins for adding comments via Disqus and friends, if you’re so inclined. I’m still trying to decide if I’m inclined or not. Surprisingly, getting data out of my old Typo blog and into Hugo was pretty simple. The hard part was recovering the ancient Postgres database the Typo used; once I’d managed to restore it, writing something to dump articles out of it into a format that Hugo could read only took a few minutes, followed by an hour or so to cleanup things like broken plugins and weird filter issues. It looks like links to Flickr images are still broken, but just about everything else should work, including inline code formatting, which turned out to be surprisingly easy.