Farewell Squarespace

I’ve hosted my webpage on Squarespace since sometime in my second year at UT Austin. After several years on the platform, I have nothing but praise for the folks at Squarespace: their reputation for up-time, customer service, and all around technical bad-assery is well deserved. If you’re looking for a web-hosting/web-design company wherein you can build a beautiful looking site without knowing any HTML, CSS, or anything of that stuff—and I do mean it: without any—then you cannot go wrong with a Squarespace site. But for me, the time has come to say goodbye.

Why leave? If I’ve been so happy with Squarespace why make the fuss? I could list a lot of reasons ranging from technical curiosity to summer boredom or whatever. But really it comes down to handful of several small but significant reasons:

1. Blog as text files (esp. in Markdown)
2. Needs of modern academics (syntax highlighting, e.g.)
3. Cost of hosting (esp. for a graduate student)
4. Reproducability

Blogging as public scholarship

I’d love to blog, er, post more “note” on teaching and learning (i.e., scholarship) but Squarespace requires new posts come from within the browser. Sure, I could open Safari, go to my blog, click on new content, write a new post, and push it to website with a simplicity that only reinforces everything I’ve said above about why non-programming professionals should take a serious look at the platform. But Squarespace is a closed system. I couldn’t even export my content from their blog except into a Wordpress XML format. Which raises an interesting question why they make support for Markdown in the first place, since the whole point of Markdown, as I understand it, is to have human readable plain text files that can be converted into HTML when needed.

Modern Academic

Related to the first item is the need to integrate other tools of modern researchers. Whether it is linking to a GitHub repo or conceptualizing blog posts as markdown files, working with a variety of open source tools have become every more integrated into the workflow of good scholarship. And although Squarespace can do some of those things, it is now much easier for me to work in an ecosystem of open, rather than closed systems.

But I need a few things that are not easy to do on their blogging module. First, as I begin to use R, Python, and other such programming tools, I need a way to work on a file in Markdown using code blocks to show my work and then easily convert that plain-text file into HTML, PDF, or LaTeX as my needs require. Such a workflow is possible using MS Word, Squarespace, and other tools, but they are not the ones I use. (I’ve not installed Microsoft Word on any computer I’ve owned since 2009 or so.)

Costs of hosting

Let’s face it, graduate students make little to nothing. Every dollar counts. When I started graduate school, I saw paying for my domain name as a sine qua non of a good online presence. But I thought I could “roll my own” and avoid paying a monthly hosting fee. I had tinkered with using Tumblr and Wordpress but found mixed results: namely, although the hosting was free and the url could be custom, the layout was garbage for professional engagement. Eventually I realized that quality can’t faked. I needed a professional looking site. Squarespace delivered.

What’s changed is that (a) my technical skills are much better than they were a few years ago and (b) free static hosting on GitHub Pages. Now I can load an entire website to a GitHub repo (short for “repository” if you’re not familiar), work a few settings, and host a website though GitHub. The only catch is that the webpages must be static rather than dynamic. The difference between the two is not really a topic for today, but the short of it is that each has their advantages. Every job needs different tools.

Anyway, the ease of which I can manage my website without paying a monthly fee was enough to finally push me to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge of website development.

Replicate research, replicate blogging, replicate anything

I already mentioned this above: exporting on Squarespace is not easy. I’m still not sure at the time of this drafting if I’ll even get my old blog over. Not that it matters since the friction to getting a post online kept many a thought, good and bad, from seeing the digital light of day. Still, it’s worth repeating: modern scholars must be able to reproduce their work. If I can’t literally email a plain text file of my blog post, journal article, or whatever to a colleague for his or her approval, I’m not doing my job right. And having multiple of versions of the same document in different formats (HTML, .MD, etc.) only increases the likelihood that at some point one file will become out of sync with the others being edited. Much easier to simply version control with git, and push the same file, always in sync, wherever it needs to go.

Hello Hugo

So I finally bit the bullet and rebuilt the site as a static webpage using Hugo and some thoughts from Kieran Healy’s post about using Hugo. I read repeatedly that the process was fast, but I was still surprised about how fast. Troubleshooting some terminal issues and downloading Hugo took more time than it did to port my major content into Hugo’s structure. Now I have a mostly hand-built site that relies on me, my GitHub, and some off the shelf tools.

I’ll spare you the overview of command to build a site. If you’re reading this and interested in trying it, I suggest reading the docs at Hugo. They will certainly be updated by the time that anyone comes across this post anyway, so there’s no need to date my work with a workflow that will be largely out of date soon anyway.

I do recommend, however, spending some time thinking about what themes for webpage layouts you like best. A lot of folks mistaken conclude they must build every last piece of code on their websites for it to really look “right” or for them to say with confidence they have HTML skills on their CVs and Resumes. But if you think of website themes, which are built on CSS, as the webpage equivalent to a LaTeX documentclass or .sty file, you’ll realize there isn’t much difference between the two and, more importantly, no need to completely re-invent the wheel.

So three cheers to Squarespace for getting me this far and three more for Hugo and GitHub Pages.