Unisite
Robert F.P. Ludwick
Unisite Begins
So much for my pledge back in 2021 that I would post more often, ’ey? Ah well. I’ll post when I can!
Anyhow, welcome to my softly-relaunched website, now available at https://robert.ludwick.us. I have merged websites into one - my previous “Linktree”-like site, and my old GitHub Pages site. They both now live here, merged together into what ought to be just one place to access information about me.
My “Linktree”-like site was formerly at the base domain https://ludwick.us. This served me well for quite awhile, but now my family have need to use some of the resources associated with this domain, so I needed to start to actually use the subdomain named for me, which was really just a duplicate of the “Linktree”-like site. Additionally, I didn’t see the need to maintain a separate site hosted at GitHub Pages (sorry GitHub!). The only thing I really saved there was the miniscule hosting costs for a statically-generated Jekyll site.
Private Repository
You may have noticed that my website is no longer in a public repository on the intertubes. This is intentional. Since I last posted in September 2022, I’ve embarked on a mission of bringing more and more of my personal technology management private. In the event I have something interesting to offer the open-source community, I will, as I have in the past. But I’m getting much more restrictive in that evaluation. The public doesn’t really need to see the Hugo source for this website. Especially since I don’t want to constantly finagle draft posts without accidentally posting their contents while in draft status.
Not only is this repository private, it’s not even on GitHub. It’s on my locally-hosted Gitea instance.
Jekyll Conversions Using Claude
Speaking of Jekyll… GitHub Pages runs on Jekyll, so I got comfortable with using that ecosystem of static website generation. Heck, when I built my home lab documentation I used Jekyll because I was already comfortable with that tooling. However, I found it annoying to get Jekyll hooked up correctly into my home lab’s CI system (I have not yet posted about that, but I hope to in the future). I decided awhile ago that I would convert from Jekyll to something newer, something which didn’t rely upon Ruby. I settled on Hugo to convert my old GitHub Pages site to this. So how did I go about that conversion?
Anthropic’s Claude.
It’s been long enough since I posted regularly that the whole AI revolution has happened, and I’m making sure to keep up (last time there was a big revolution in tech, I let cloud computing pass me by for years…). I’m a Claude subscriber and used it to run a conversion from Jekyll to Hugo. While there were some rough edges I had to address, and some of my own work to spruce up the site since Hugo had some features either not present in Jekyll or that I wasn’t using… It really, really made the conversion quite fast.
I also converted my home lab docs using Claude. However, I didn’t go to Hugo for those, since I wanted something more purpose-built for documentation. I went with Docusaurus. It’s better than Jekyll, but for me it’s still annoying in that you are swapping out the Ruby ecosystem for the Node ecosystem. I vastly prefer the single binary that can run a Hugo website (though I need to use a publishing container image which also includes git and go since I’m using an external theme).
As a quite aside about AI - I intend to post at length on this subject in the future. I have a lot of opinions and thoughts about AI, as it pertains to a great many things in our society and world.
Going Forward
Well, I’ve already noted that I want to update everybody about my home lab’s continued evolution since I last posted about it in late 2021. I also want to post about AI in general. I have a lot of other things to post about eventually, too. This time, though, I won’t promise to be really good about posting regularly. History suggests I won’t, so no promises - just that I’ll post when I’m willing and able to do so.
I also intend to post about the fact that in 2025 I distributed the electronic music I wrote decades ago…