So its done! I finally released a fairly easy to install (from scratch) Hugo based Static Site generator with full ActivityPub support.

It has step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for your own blog or static website.

One of the coolest features for me, other than having your static site blog posts show up as posts in the Fediverse is the support for interacting with those posts. Any replies you leave, likes, or boosts will show up in the "comments" section of the website on the page associated with the post. How cool is that!

@freemo Fabulous. I looked at Hugo and it drove me mad. Curious how you made that magic happen.

@paul I found it to be a arelatively simple static site engine overall. But it does take some time to learn the language. If there is something in particular that confuses you just let me know.

@freemo Trying something. It already fails:

$ hugo new content posts/my-first-post.md
Error: failed to resolve "content" to a archetype template

(Just following the first site steps on https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/ )

Did you run into this as well?
@freemo Ahhh, the code on the quickstart page is wrong.
$ hugo new content/post/filename.md

works a lot better.

@paul I would follow the instructions on the git for fedipage rather than hugo if your trying to setup fedipage: git.qoto.org/fedipage/fedipage

@freemo For now I am trying to get hugo to actually add a new content .md file. Which actually worked in the end, when I found what was wrong.

@paul You doing this in a new project or as part of fedipage?

@freemo I am doing this as a new project without fedipage.

First I want to get a bit of a feel for it. If it's easy enough, I may examine if there is a way to import my various existing (static site) sites into Hugo, through some converter or so. Those have hundreds of articles and pages, so I'm not typing them in again 😉

Also I'm not going to put a lot of time into it every day. My workdays are long enough. 😉

@paul

I moved over from middleman static site generator. The pages moved over without a hitch for me. Any markdown based source should be relatively easy to convert.

Keep in mind Hugo wont give you fediverse/activityPub access on its own. Its just another (nice) static site generator. The ability to integrate with the fediverse is entirely a fedipage thing.

@freemo My sites are in a SQLite database, created by Publii, which creates clean HTML when I output the site. Nothing markdown about it.
This does not sound like an easy transfer, then. Thank you for the information.
I'm not focussing on the Fedipage part for anything at the moment. If I can't make Hugo work for me 'as is' (including importing my existing sites), then that route is not happening.
It might be interesting for a new site I could set up. But that's not in the books yet.

@paul Going from raw html will be more difficult.

You might need some additional effort.

When you write your journal entries then you are writing them in raw HTML? If not what markup language do you write your articles in?

@freemo No Markup language.

See image of Publii's post editor:
You will probably start crying now. Sorry.

@paul Ohhh its a wysiwig... yea sadly unless you can find a way to convert it you may be in for some trouble. Personally this is why i dont use blogging tools that dont use open standard formats like markdown to begin with.

Hugo does support html markup but you'd likely have to heavily edit that format since it would have to be an html fragment without all the header and styling stuff.

@freemo Using pandoc it's nearly no work to create markdown files from the exported static site. That's good.
@freemo Done messing for now. I have 2 posts in the posts directory and the localhost:1313 only shows an empty page, with source
<pre>
</pre>
So that's very Zen but not what I am looking for. 🤣
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@paul haha its fairly automatic if you have the right directory structure and settings. Can be hard to do from scratch though if you dont know the right settings.

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