The big unbundle

A year ago, I urged fellow Hugo users to organize their websites by using page bundles. While it still may be a good idea for many others, it’s ceased to be the best course for me, so this site is now unbundled once again. In the end, it was a battle of comfort-and-convenience versus “best practices.”

Comfort-and-convenience kicked butt and took names.

As a result, this post now comes to you from:

.   <-- The Hugo project folder
└─ content
    └─ posts
        └─ 2023
            └─ 07
                └─ big-unbundle.md

. . . rather than from:

.   <-- The Hugo project folder
└─ content
    └─ posts
        └─ 2023
            └─ 07
                └─ big-unbundle
                    └─ index.md

This also required me to move my image files from within individual posts’ folders (where they were page resources) to the project’s assets/images/ folder (where they became global resources), so I had to change that images-handling code about which I wrote earlier this week.¹

You can correctly assume that these changes involved a lot of grunt work. What made them worth it?

First, I no longer needed to use page bundles. That post from last year arose when I wanted to use Hugo’s Overlay filter for automated creation of my pages’ social media images. At the time, page bundles made that easier. Since then, I’ve adopted a different method that gives me even better results; and I haven’t come up with another compelling reason for using page bundles other than because of that earlier post about using them. That wasn’t enough.

Second — and this is what got me to thinking about making the switch in the first place — it became inconvenient to keep each post as an index.md file in its own folder. For example, when clicking on my content editor’s dock icon, this was the “recent files” list I might see:

Not very helpful, right?

Now, to be sure, I could also see them listed in this more helpful and informative way:

. . . but that was possible only after I’d actually opened the editor, as opposed to just clicking the dock icon.

Is that a petty reason even to think about doing such an about-face, much less actually to go through with it? Perhaps. But minor irritations of this nature, repeated day after day for months at a time, annoy me mightily; so there’s that.

Besides, I also find it more intuitive and, yes, more comfortable to manage an unbundled site’s overall file-storage arrangement, regardless of any other factors that may merit consideration. It’s the way I managed the site project for the overwhelming majority of its history before now. Despite my age, I typically am not someone who resists change, at least if I can understand a good reason for the change — but I do frequently object to change-for-the-sake-of-change, and this seemed to have become one of those cases.

Latest commit (5cd2d446) for page file:
2023-07-27 at 8:31:54 AM CDT.
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