# Current state

I’ve got Hugo up and running nicely. I’m getting down how the flow of everything works with it and what the built-in features are.

I’m pretty happy with how it looks and I really like the fact that it is a static site with very little configuration.

I have the whole thing under source control on an instance of Gitea on my VPS. It is mirrored to my personal Github account for redundancy. On the VPS I have the repo cloned into twice. Once for production and once for testing. The testing allows me to run hugo server -D --baseUrl test.digitallyadrift.com and I can play around with it in a more realistic environment than testing changes locally.

Serving the site from those repos is handled in two very different ways. The production one is fully static and just uses nginx to point to my static build files. The dev one relies on a reverse proxy to point from another subdomain to the hugo server running at http://localhost:1313. The dev server uses Yunohost user management to restrice acess to only my Yunohost admin account which will keep me from exposing my test environment to the world.

# Up next

## Content

I really like what 32bit.cafe reccommends for some of the static pages on your blog. Specifically now and uses to capture what I’m currently into and what I’m currently using. I think I’d like to get those set up in a way that shows a history so I can look back and see how I change over time.

So far the majority of the things I’ve written about since starting this blog at the beginning of the year (2025) has been about my process of getting everything set up. My hope/intention when starting this was to use it more of a public journal to document whatever is on my mind at a given time.

## Theme

I like the current theme I’m using but there are so many options I think I’ll likely play around with various options before I settle on something more permanantly. If I find any features/shortcodes/styles/whatever in a theme that I end up not using but like, I will probably try and port those over to my default so I can use it across themes.

## Workflow

I still would like to find a better workflow that doesn’t involve me logging in to my VPS and running git pull or hugo in my prod directory to get things up and running. I know some people use rsync or sftp to move files from local to server but I want something that is more platform generic. I want to be able to write posts from anywhere; phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. I would also like to avoid using a CMS. I tried TinaCMS and it was really cool but not very easy to get up and running for full self-hosting. A CMS also adds another layer of complexity to the whole setup which I’d like to avoid if possible.

## Features

Webmentions setup and running. It seems like there are some really solid hosted services that make it easy to get it set up but I would like to explore the technology a little bit more and see what self-hosted options exist.

Need to look into federation with the fediverse. Currently I have a Micro.blog account that follows this site’s RSS feed and from there I can have it sync to basically any social media as well as it’s own activitypub compatible account. I’m running my own GoToSocial server on my VPS so I’m sure there’s a way I can hook into that and use it rather than relying on a third party (as a note, I very much like Micro.blog and the work that is being done there and fully intend to keep my paid account going there even if I do figure out how to federate on my own).

Use tags better. Most of my pre Hugo posts have no tags. I would like to start tagging things better since they can so easily be grouped and filtered later.

Add search. I don’t really have enough content for this to be a valuable feature yet but it would be cool to have as I continue to write here. There seem to be a couple of easy to include resources for this in Hugo so it shouldn’t be too hard.