Saturday, March 5, 2022

I keep telling myself I'm never again going to change the domain name on an establishes website. And yet, I moved this Tinderbox-generated site from notes.baty.net to daily.baty.net to tb.baty.net and now back to notes.baty.net. Let's leave it alone now, m'kay? (It'll be broken there until DNS catches up.)

I wrote a little about plain text files

So, back up those Word docs and PDFs and Mindmaps and Powerpoints. And back up your plain text files, too. At least that way you stand a chance of having them “someday in the future”. You can worry about how to open them then.

I'm still thinking about this.

The tricky part with using Tinderbox to generate websites is that the export features are almost too powerful and configurable. I've gotten things arranged the way I want them here, but it feels fragile. I hesitate to tweak any of the templates for fear of breaking the site.

What if, instead of exporting HTML files from Tinderbox, I export Hugo-compatible Markdown files? I could use Tinderbox as the authoring, organizing, and linking environment, and then let Hugo generate the actual website.

The upside is that Hugo templates are made for creating websites/blogs. All the tagging, markup, RSS feeds, and other bloggy stuff is already built. And I can use any of the many nice themes instead of this cobbled thing I'm using now.

On the other hand, it's a pretty big moving part. And is generating Markdown any simpler than HTML? Do I end up with the same fragile process, plus the need for Hugo?