There were some changes here in the backend.

I still really like idea of Static Site Generator, but after using it for a while overhead of editing stuff locally and syncing it between different computers became a bit too much. I wanted to have a way to just login inside a browser and make some changes from there.

I’ve tried few things, but without much luck. First was Netlify, but the way I have that required to use separate domain. I’ve tried some Visual Code extension, but it was still not the convenience I was looking for.

On the back of my mind I had TinaCMS. First time I’ve heard about it was when I read what Smashing Magazine uses to organize it’s content. I even tried it locally, but was not successful with what I wanted. However, I decided to give it a second look.

Adding my phone existing Hugo configuration to Tina wasn’t working, so I decided to try from scratch TinaCMS project and expand it with my content. That worked much better, but with small tradeoffs - page bundles wasn’t working as I wanted. After thinking about page architecture it wasn’t that big of a deal and I decided I could live with that.

Other than that, I had to do was to change all my front matter metadata from TOML to YAML. This was easy - just a couple of Find and Replace operations in files in Visual Studio Code.

After that everything worked locally on mely computer. To have it also be available on the internet I used Tina Cloud. I thing this was a mistake I’ve made first time researching TinaCMS. I assumed Cloud wasn’t free, but somehow I missed that there is separate tier outside of priced tiers comparison. Configuration of Cloud wasn’t that heard. Just generate and copy some keys.

The last missing piece was updating GitHub Action to build also TinaCMS. It meant adding one more step before building Hugo.

And just like that it’s working!

I still need to tidy up some things and organize my content better, but I’m happy that I got this running. I can lay on my balcony and write this words on my phone without worrying that when I get up and sit by my desk I need to do some synchronization before I can start writing again.

I hope this less overhead on the process will give me more motivation to create something here more often.