GenAI is a viable alternative to automatic summaries which makes the blog posts more appealing. Create them ad-hoc or automate them. Add them to the front matter section in your posts and you will save your time while you can focus on hand-crafting the actual posts

While working on a blog post, I discovered a way to proofread my drafts in an easy way. This might not be very revolutionary, but it was so convenient that I wanted to share it with the world.

I use Hugo for my static website. On my local computer I can preview it in the browser under localhost:1313. Copilot Sidebar in Edge does the same! This means I can ask it to proofread it.

I haven’t had comments on my blog since I moved from wordpress. Until now. I just added comments back to my blog and here is how I did it.

The most convinient way is integrating my blog with Github Discussions using giscus.

The giscuss.app page walks you through the setup and authorization process.

I created a new public repository on Github, then I enabled Discussions feature on the repository (Settings -> Features).

Hello World

Now I have moved my blog. chuvash.eu is a static site. I’ll share more details and insights later.

Update 2022-02-10

It has passed a few months since the move from Wordpress to a static site. Now it is time to summarize the insights.

Why I moved

Here are the reasons why I switched from Wordpress.com to a static site

1. To be honest, the main reason was that I was curious about static sites.
2. It appealed to me to have a fast and secure website (because there is no database that slows down or gets hacked).
3. I finally got rid of the annoying ads from Wordpress.com. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Wordpress.com, as a matter of fact, I sacrified some really neat functions (such as the comments and the community) when moving to a static, but on that later.
4. It finally got free from the vendor lock-in. Now I have all my blog posts as markdown files in a git repository. I can build them to any static website or even consume as they are, no fiddling with a database (if it were a own hosted wordpress site). I find it also easier to collaborate on my blog posts since I can grant access to the git repository to people I want to work together with.
5. Speaking of git, now I have real version history of my content, no more accidential deletions.

Well, there might be more reasons, but these are the most important ones.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 54,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 12 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Comments from Wordpress.com

Justin Cooney - Jan 3, 2013