I've switched my real personal domain name to using Apéro

[johngoldin]

My Apéro-themed site is now live at (https://www.johngoldin.com).

Doing this conversion has had me looking at my old content and seeing there are a few things I need to tidy up. Given that I don't have much of an audience (or aspire to much of an audience), I can be a bit casual about making a major change to the site such as switching to a new theme.

I still had a few issues:

1. I'm mystified by why I can't get favicon to work. Right now it's showing my GitHub profile picture and I don't know where it's getting that from. I'll work on this some more. It certainly isn't using the icon pointed to in config.yaml. I have actually see that show up in at least one trial repo I published on netlify.

2. I'm not using the original repo that I used for my pre-Apéro site. I had converted that to Apéro and it worked fine with serve_site() in blowdown, but I kept having various problems when I published it to Netlify. The repo is probably at least six years old. I ended up making a clean repo and copying folders over from the old repo. I realize now that I had not been practicing good housekeeping. The old repo was up to 2.6GB! The clean repo is 0.5GB. Right now my domain is using (https://github.com/johngoldin/can_i_get_a_clean_project), a name which indicates a degree of flailing trial and error. I would like to get back to using my original repo name. I'll have to read up on how to change the name of a repo. The moral of the story is that I shouldn't have attempted to convert my old blog in the old repo. That's especially true given that I had to switch the folder organization from "post" to "blog".

3. I had a weird problem where the social icons would appear just fine on my serve_site() pages, and would show on Netlify served site that were not associated with my permanent domain name, but would not show up with my domain name. I would see blank squares instead of the social icons. This was fixed once I used a clean repo with my domain name. But I still don't know what really caused the problem or what fixed it. I looked very hard for differences between the repo where it worked and the repo where it didn't work and I couldn't see any. The version with missing social icons is still visible at (https://can-i-blog-too.netlify.app), at least for now.

4. I'm sure I don't have my Collection organized properly. I have some idea how to correct that. Meanwhile it sort of functions OK.

5. I remain confused about the baseURL parameter in config.yaml. At this point I think I ended up with a simple slash. As I was having other problems I kept trying to switch it to www.johngoldin.com. Sometimes that seemed to cause problems, but I was having enough other issues that I was never sure that baseURL was my key issue. (More symptoms of flailing around.)

I'm quite happy with the result so far, and feel inspired to make more use of my web site.