Hello everypeep!
If any of you have visited this site before, you may have noticed a few changes. Even if you haven't ever visited this site, and its quite possible since I have not done much to spread awareness of this site, I still wanted to do this little post. Its mostly for me, and a bit for testing how things will work going forward. Anyway, the important bit is that the site is now running on a different platform, or more specifically, it is now being built on another platform. First, I guess I little background information is in order.
Yaya's World and how it was built before
If you have visited the site and had a look at your address bar you may have noticed that page was a static HTML page. Every page had the same navigation bar, the same top bar, and the same header. Some might think this was done using Dreamweaver, and it was, at first. Recently though every page was actually written in a simple markup language, then it was built into HTML with all the standard stuff added in by a my editor of choice and that the result was then uploaded to a server. This allowed me to write and edit everything in a pretty distraction free way but still have navigation and everything working on each page on the site. Unfortunately, it became a bit of a chore to build the site and maintain all those template parts (the header and footer). So I just kinda stopped doing it ( ^ ~ ^ ;;
How I am trying to build the site now
I recently came across an interesting YouTube video by someone named Chris Titus. He was showing off how he managed to keep is site up-to-date and do all the other things he does on a daily basis. I found this kinda of interesting and an answer to my problem of keeping my own site up-to-date. Now I am using Hugo with a theme he recommends to work on my site.
What is Hugo?
I don't know if Hugo makes building websites fun again per se, but it certain makes things easier. Simply put Hugo is a framework for building websites. Its a program that I have installed on my MacBook that takes my ramblings written in Markdown or a similar markup language and builds HTML webpages with from them using a theme that provides some of the things my old site has. This can then be deployed to a my webserver, but this is almost exactly how things worked before only there is less gobbly goop that I have to maintain myself. However, Hugo does a bit more than just build the website.
How does Hugo help me?
Aside from managing a theme and template for me where I use simple configurations to add and remove things that then apply to all pages and building a static site, Hugo provides a little webserver that allows me to see changes in realtime as I edit them. So I just type in my editor using a simple markup language than save those changes and then go to a browser that is already open to my local webserver and those changes are already applied, no need to hit refresh. This happens whether I'm changing a webpage, editing a theme configuration, or adding something new. I can literally see how it will look on the site before I deploy to the site all without having to hit refresh or anything but just looking at a browser window. Its really helpful. Also I was able to set up a little script I can run that will build and deploy the site with one command, so that's also cool.
A regression
Everything isn't quite peachy though. Many of the image-heavy pages, like the ADVENTURES gallery are not up anymore. This is a limitation of how I have Hugo set up currently. I'll be looking into fixing this has I move forward, however, so hopefully all those memories will be back soon.
Plans for the future
So now I'm hoping to use this platform to expand the site beyond Fiesta Online. I've played many other games and, though I still spend most of my time playing MMOs in Fiesta Online, I would like to expand this site to include some of the other things that I end up playing, even things that might not be MMOs ( ^ . ~ ). I hope anyone who might be reading this will stick around and see how this site evolves in the coming months!
-Yayoi