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Dynamically Generating OpenGraph Images With Hugo

I've lately seen some folks on social.lol posting about their various strategies for automatically generating Open Graph images for their Eleventy sites. So this weekend I started exploring how I could do that for my Hugo site1. During my search, I came across a few different approaches using external services or additional scripts to run at build time, but I was hoping for a way to do this with Hugo's built-in tooling.

Displaying Data from a Tempest Weather Station on a Static Site

As I covered briefly in a recent Scribble, I was inspired by the way Kris's omg.lol page displays realtime data from his Weatherflow Tempest weather station. I thought that was really neat and wanted to do the same on my omg.lol page with data from my own Tempest, but I wanted to find a way to do it without needing to include an authenticated API call in the client-side JavaScript.

Deploying a Hugo Site to Neocities with GitHub Actions

I came across Neocities many months ago, and got really excited by the premise: a free web host with the mission to bring back the "fun, creativity and independence that made the web great." I spent a while scrolling through the gallery of personal sites and was amazed by both the nostalgic vibes and the creativity on display. It's like a portal back to when the web was fun. Neocities seemed like something I wanted to be a part of so I signed up for an account.

Spotlight on Torchlight

I've been futzing around a bit with how code blocks render on this blog. Hugo has a built-in, really fast, syntax highlighter courtesy of Chroma. Chroma is basically automatic and it renders very quickly1 during the hugo build process, and it's a pretty solid "works everywhere out of the box" option. That said, the one-size-fits-all approach may not actually fit everyone well, and Chroma does leave me wanting a bit more.

virtuallypotato -> runtimeterror

cp -a virtuallypotato.com runtimeterror.dev # [tl! .cmd:2] rm -rf virtuallypotato.com ln -s virtuallypotato.com runtimeterror.dev If you've noticed that things look a bit different around here, you might also have noticed that my posts about VMware products had become less and less frequent over the past year or so. That wasn't intentional, but a side-effect of some shifting priorities with a new position at work. I'm no longer on the team responsible for our VMware environment and am now more focused on cloud-native technologies and open-source DevOps solutions.

Script to Convert Posts to Hugo Page Bundles

In case you missed the news, I recently migrated this blog from a site built with Jekyll to one built with Hugo. One of Hugo's cool features is the concept of Page Bundles, which bundle a page's resources together in one place instead of scattering them all over the place. Let me illustrate this real quick-like. Focusing only on the content-generating portions of a Hugo site directory might look something like this:

Hello Hugo

Oops, I did it again. It wasn't all that long ago that I migrated this blog from Hashnode to a Jekyll site published via GitHub Pages. Well, a few weeks ago I learned a bit about another static site generator called Hugo, and I just had to give it a try. And I came away from my little experiment quite impressed! While Jekyll is built on Ruby and requires you to install and manage a Ruby environment before being able to use it to generate a site, Hugo is built on Go and requires nothing more than the hugo binary.

Recreating Hashnode Series (Categories) in Jekyll on GitHub Pages

I recently migrated this site from Hashnode to GitHub Pages, and I'm really getting into the flexibility and control that managing the content through Jekyll provides. So, naturally, after finalizing the move I got to work recreating Hashnode's "Series" feature, which lets you group posts together and highlight them as a collection. One of the things I liked about the Series setup was that I could control the order of the collected posts: my posts about building out the vRA environment in my homelab are probably best consumed in chronological order (oldest to newest) since the newer posts build upon the groundwork laid by the older ones, while posts about my other one-off projects could really be enjoyed in any order.

Virtually Potato migrated to GitHub Pages!

After a bit less than a year of hosting my little technical blog with Hashnode, I spent a few days migrating the content over to a new format hosted with GitHub Pages. So long, Hashnode Hashnode served me well for the most part, but it was never really a great fit for me. Hashnode's focus is on developer content, and I'm not really a developer; I'm a sysadmin who occasionally develops solutions to solve my needs, but the code is never the end goal for me.

Script to update image embed links in Markdown files

I'm preparing to migrate this blog thingy from Hashnode (which has been great!) to a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll so that I can write posts locally and then just do a git push to publish them - and get some more practice using git in the process. Of course, I've written some admittedly-great content here and I don't want to abandon that. Hashnode helpfully automatically backs up my posts in Markdown format to a private GitHub repo so it was easy to clone those into a local working directory, but all the embedded images were still hosted on Hashnode:

runtimeterror  


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