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I have recently been using tools like Athens research and LogSeq for connected note taking (see my previous post). A key thing you may want to check before choosing the one you will use is the lincese of each. As I write these lines Athens is friendlier if you plan to use it for work. LogSeq one, unfortunately, not so much. However if you plant to use it for fun, LogSeq is feature packed, the team keeps delivering and outstanding product, and the new publishing capability is great. ...

Here we go! It has been a while. I finally got around getting rid of WordPress for this site. The amount of functionality and machinery required to just render a simple blog started to show its age. I just wanted a simple, easy to update, website. Eventually, I settled for Hugo, a fast framework to create websites. Moving out of WordPress required the following steps: Go to the managed WordPress installation and get an export of all posts and pages. Download all the files uploaded that are part of the site content. After multiple failed attempts, blog2md turned out to be the tool that got me the farther. It converted the export into a collection of markdown files for each post and page. It also output files for contents, but I discarded those since most of them were old ping backs. Then, quite a bit of manual clean up. Shortcodes for embedded content etc. needed to be converted to Hugo’s shortcodes. I could have automated, but the numbers were small and I also wanted to reread all the content. Move the uploads to the right place and make sure all markdown correctly links to it. At this point, I was able to create and bring up the Hugo development server locally using some random theme so I could see a working version of how the site would work. After this milestone, yes, a few more hours cleaning up content but now everything was quick to iterate. Once all the content was ready, time to move to the looks. ...

It has been a while since the last face lift to this blog. No, I was not planning any major revamp, but a simple one. Since it was released, I had the little green ShareThis button hanging around. I just wanted to balance a bit the elements on the page. I decided to reposition the button on the top right of the excerpts and on the post themselves. While doing the repositioning I decided to simplify a bit its functionality and replace the button with something a bit lighter and still with purpose. After giving it a bit of a thought I replaced it with Google’s +1 button for publishers. It looks a little best balanced and it does not clutter the layout. You can find more information on how to add the +1 button to your site can be found at the +1 button page for webmasters. ...