Leon Mika

You’ve probably noticed¹ that I’ve stopped posting links to Open Bookmarks, and have started posting them here again. The main reason for this is that I’ve abandoned work on the CMS I was working on that powered that bookmarking site. Yes, yes, I know: another one. Open Bookmarks was basically a static Hugo site, hosted on Netlify. But being someone that wanted to make it easy for me to post new links without having to do a Git checkout, or fiddle around YAML front-matter, I thought of building a simple web-service for this.

I don’t want to say too much about it, other than I managed to get the post functionality working. Creating a new link post would involve fetching the page, and pre-populating the link and optional via link with the fetched page title. I’d just finish the post with some quotes or quips, then click Post. That’ll save the post in a local database, write it to a staged Hugo site, run Hugo to generate the static site, and upload it to Netlify. There was nothing special about link posts per se: they were just a specialisation of the regular posting feature — a template if you will — which would work the same way, just without the pre-fills.

The other thing I added was support for adding arbitrary pages. This was a dramatic simplification to what is possible in Hugo, in that only one page bundle was supported. And it was pretty compromised: you had to set the page title to “Index” to modify the home page. But this was enough for that, plus some additional pages at the top level.

One other feature was that you can “preview” the site if you didn’t have a Netlify site setup and you wanted to see the Hugo site within the app itself. I had an idea of adding support for staging posts prior to publishing them to Netlify, so that one could look at them. But this never got built.

Finally there were some options for configuring the site properties. Uploads were never implemented.

Here are some screenshots, which isn’t much other than evidence that I was prioritising the backend over the user experience:

So, why was this killed? Well, apart from the fact that it seemed like remaking prior art — I’m sure there are plenty of Hugo CMSes out there — it seemed strange having two systems that relate to blogging. Recognising this, I decided to add this functionality to Blogging Tools:

This can’t really be described as CMS. It’s more of a place to create posts from a template which can then be published via a Micropub endpoint. But it does the job I need, which is creating link posts with the links pre-filled.