The summer is a great time for catching up on research, or for frittering away time on inessential infrastructure projects. After updating my RMarkdown templates for presentations and papers, I have just spent a few days migrating my website off of Wordpress onto Hugo. Hugo is a static site generator, which means that all the content management happens on my computer, and all that gets uploaded to my site are a collection of static pages. It is fast, and the content lives in tidy markdown files in a sane folder hierarchy on my Dropbox, so I can update the site from any of my computers.
Many thanks to Kieran Healy for posting the source to his Hugo-based site on Github. I have rearranged the furniture and changed the books on the shelves, but the resemblance is still there. I have never met Kieran (I occasionally tweet at him) but he does social scientists a great service with all the content he posts on his academic workflow.
One lesson I relearned in moving things over from my old site was to always use doi.org links, not direct links to the journal publisher’s page for the article. When I went through the links from the old version of the site, I discovered half of them were broken. Some of these were because journals had changed publishers (eg Political Analysis). Of course I am now breaking all my urls by switching to a new web engine, so I can hardly complain! Hopefully I fixed all of them, but if anyone is actually reading this and sees something broken, let me know.