Late last week there was some idle chatter in an internal channel about blog software. Quite a few of my colleagues run their own websites, often using a Solaris 11.3 kernel zone. I mentioned the software that I've been using (well-known) and one particular colleague was aghast.

He recommended that I investigate a static site generator, such as Jekyll or Hugo.

I spent quite a few hours mucking around trying to get Jekyll to work - and I assume that if I hadn't wanted to import my old site and have simple image galleries then it would have been find. However, it didn't work out for me, so I decided to give Hugo a shot. Within a few hours I had got most things working, and just needed to tweak the image gallery thing a bit. Carefully following the instructions at http://www.thehome.dk/article/photoswipe-gallery-hugo/ (and remembering to put my wp-upload hierarchy under $TOP/static) got me a much nicer post about our new pool. While over time I will go back through old posts and prettify them, I've only done a few for the moment.

It's going to take me a while to get used to Markdown, and I'm sure I'll wind up with a bit of javascript too. The major change, however, is that because Hugo is a static site generator, comments don't fit into the scheme unless you use a service like Disqus. I'm not all that interested in doing that, so if you like what I've written somewhere (or wish to let me know about a broken link), please email me instead.

Today marks the end of an era for us - as of this morning we've churned our landline from Internode across to Skymesh, so our connections to the world are all digital. I've unplugged the RJ-11 connectors for the POTS, removed the line filter, and have a shiny-ish ATA on the desk underneath the phone base station.

When I was going through the signup process for our rather nice HFC connection, Internode was unable to confirm that we could keep our landline number when going VoIP. I was sad about it, but not too sad - we would have gotten a new, unlisted number instead. The brief flirtation with MyRepublic also saw the prospect of a new number and I was fully expecting Skymesh to say the same thing. However, when I received the notification from their systems on Monday, I was delighted to see that we've kept our number. {That's made a few family members happy as well!}.