The White Pube is the collective identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, under which they are best known for their writing about the art world, video games, food and more. Their six year old site built on Wix was becoming unwieldy and challenging to manage, and with widespread calls to boycott Wix by BDS, they felt it was well past time to move on to a new system.

We kept the frontend exactly the same as it’s perfect and a key part of their identity. Using various web scraping tools and lots of find and replace, we copied all 400+ pages off their current site and remade them using simple web standards - markdown, html and images. For this we used the Hugo static site generator for it’s speed and ability to resize images all using a single binary executable.

We then taught them both how to edit this content using hugo, markdown and git, with some basic command line support. Through this education they’re now finding it takes 5 minutes rather than 45 to publish an article, and are actually enjoying the process of publishing! As a result of this the site now has several new sections as it’s easy for them to add, and Gabrielle has created her own site from scratch using the tools we gave them. It’s also free to host so is saving them a little bit every month over Wix.

For us this really encapsulated our approach to tech education – with a bit of teaching, a bit of specialist code and some good overall strategy, we’ve given Gabrielle and Zarina life long skills and direct access to their published output at the code level.