Lost & Found

🌊 more process than thing 🌊

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages. Squarespace is the registrar for the domain. There is no good reason this time to set up email at this domain.

Right before rebooting my writing effort, I tried Substack. One of the lies that I told myself was that I was not merely avoiding the few hours’ work of standing up a static site. Another was that Substack provides the benefits of Twitter without Twitter’s asinine glibness. Logging in to my dashboard made me hate myself, and I published literally nothing. Substack reminds me of those sacks of honey-glazed nut clusters sold as paleo or keto snacks at Costco. I guess Pages is glib too ðŸĪŠ

Why Pages? In the past, I have used AWS and Cloudflare. Those are great but have more features than I need. GitHub itself is necessary, and Pro provides private repositories that are not hobbled. And $4 per month is reasonable.

The custom domain setup is straightforward in that GitHub’s instructions work. Building and deploying took some troubleshooting, though. You might find a better way. A few pointers in case I have to do this again for someone else:

  • use a theme that makes it easy to change favicon and socials
  • build locally with Hugo; change publishDir value to docs in the config
  • some kind of extended Hugo version; google it
  • tell GitHub to deploy from a branch
  • if needed, edit static.yml to point to built site and to use right Action versions
  • get rid of any hugo.yml or toml you might find (look in .github/workflows)
  • probably delete docs before rebuilding
  • and probably add CNAME and .nojekyll back in after build
  • generate favicons and put them in the right spot, then edit layouts till errors stop
  • favicon need not be surrealist sketch of monster drawn in high school

That is all for now. I reserve the right to add more pages but probably will keep this minimalist format. The subset of $\LaTeX$ supported by MatJax is all I need 🙏

Coda

What does reamstack mean? Nothing is hidden: a stack of stacks of white printer paper. That’s it. I like them 😇