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 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 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…