Don't know much about Git
This might come as a surprise for some, but as a person who writes a blog in Hugo and hosts it on GitLab, I don’t really know how to use Git.
As a matter of fact, I don’t use Git directly: I use Magit on Emacs. One of my first posts on this blog describes my difficulty learning Hugo, and with it, Git, Magit, Github, and ox-Hugo, all of which I use to publish the posts on this blog.
This doesn’t make any sense, does it? How on earth does a person who doesn’t know how to use Git publishes a blog using all of these tools? The answer is, very carefully and with a healthy dosage of anxiety.
That has been me, pretty much, since the end of 2018. I recently took a basic level course in Git on Linked, now getting deep into part two, which includes branches and collaboration.
One of the things I’m trying to do to help is to stop using Magit, at least for now. My use case is fairly basic, and I need to practice what I’ve learned on the command line before I forget. I am still wary of opening branches and trying out new improvements to the site, but I’m getting there. “Fear is the mind-killer,” says Dune, and this has been very true for me and Git.
So far I managed to make a couple of useful tweaks that I didn’t dare before. I removed the site’s .org file, which is only used when I write the posts in org-mode (ox-Hugo then translates the headers in org-mode into markdown for Hugo to use). I also discovered a couple of branches that were created because of Sycnthing conflicts and removed them.
All in all, not bad! And it has been fun.