I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh.

I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek.

However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears.

  1. No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory. After half a dozen posts with a few pictures each it became a mess. I wanted to be able to separate out the images in some sensible manner.
  2. There was no control over the size of images unless you appended some API parameters to the file name. This broke the image preview in a Markdown viewer which meant I couldn’t see what the image looked like until I published the post.

So, Hugo. I originally wanted to use Hexo, but the image plugin for that doesn’t install. I plumped for Hugo as https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil uses it for his blog and that’s good enough for me.

It simply (nearly) fixes both the issues I had with prose.sh. I can’t see images in the Markdown preview, but I can see them live in the browser I have open being served locally before I publish.

Deployment is still just an rsync to my NAS, from which this is being served to you.