Tag: websites

Letterboxd

~ cafebedouin

“What is Letterboxd?

Letterboxd is a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past. Showcase your favorites on your profile page. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying. Keep a watchlist of films you’d like to see, and create lists/collections on any given topic. We’ve been described as “like GoodReads for movies”.

https://letterboxd.com

New to me. IMDB doesn’t really do this that well. So, hopefully, this will be an improvement.

Rome2Rio

~ cafebedouin

“Rome2rio makes travel planning easy. We are a door-to-door travel information and booking engine, helping you get to and from any location in the world safely.

Enter any address, landmark, or city as your destination and we will instantly display all your travel and booking options, along with information about accommodation and things to do, in one convenient spot.

Whether you’re after flight, train, bus, ferry, rideshare or rental car info, we’ve got estimated prices, journey durations and booking details from over 5000 companies in more than 160 countries – making us one of the top online travel resources used globally.

Download our app, so you can plan your journey while you are on the road, wherever you are.”

–https://rome2rio.com

Newsletters & The Web

~ cafebedouin

“My friend Lucy once told me that she falls in love with the way that someone thinks…and that’s what newsletters make possible for me; they’re a record of how strangers see the world…[But] I guess there’s something about newsletters that bugs me, and I can’t put my finger on it…[proceeds to put finger on it, i.e., newsletters are easy to write, notify people of new work and provide a way to pay for content, which are all things they web should do and doesn’t.]

—Robin Rendle, “Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me.” RobinRendle.com. January 1, 2021.

I agree with everything Robin Rendle writes in this essay. And I appreciated the irony that when I wanted to subscribe to his site’s RSS feed, I learned he probably doesn’t have one. He is using netlify, which has some github projects that can generate RSS for a netlify site, but probably not given how his site is set-up without trying to rewrite plug-in code. I guess we can call this Exhibit A for the point he is making?

Static Websites with Hugo

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

I created a website back in 2010. It’s a professional website. It has a personal profile, description of the work, location and contact page. None of these change with any regularity. So, I just needed a few static pages.

I wanted to get up something quick. So, I had coded what I needed over a week, wrote all the copy and put the site up. Back then, around a quarter of the population had a smart phone, so it did not seem necessary to worry about mobile access to the site. So, I have a great site that works well for the PC. But, it’s useless on mobile. That’s not going to work in 2019.

But, I’ve been dreading doing the update. I figured it would be an unmitigated pain to code a site that worked across platforms. Being inclined to take the easiest route to solve a problem, I thought I might check to see if there was some free software that would help me make the transition with a minimum of fuss.

Turns out, there’s a lot of open source software to build static websites. Jekyll and Hugo are probably the most popular. But, Wintersmith, Harp, Middleman, and others are all viable options. I ended up using Hugo because of the two top options it didn’t require installation of any additional software on my system.

It ended up taking about two days to port the website content to Hugo. Most of the time was just understanding how Hugo works, such as the need to create directories and then put an index.md in each of them to get the content to link up right from the main page.

In retrospect, there are two main considerations in this process. One, pick a system that will convert your old website for you, if you have a large site. For small static sites like mine, this really isn’t a problem. Two, make sure whatever you use has good theme support and choose a theme that has the built in look and feel you want for your site.

For example, I looked at Nikola first, but its theme support is largely non-existent. It became apparent I’d have better luck choosing the top two options after looking at this one.

Once the choice of system and theme is made, the coding and porting of sites is pretty straight-forward. I did have to noodle around a bit with templates to get the result I wanted, but it wasn’t much different from using HTML, just at one level of abstraction.

If you have the need to put up a small website that works on both PCs and mobile, using a static site generator like Hugo will save you a lot of time and be relatively painless. Recommended.