A New Blog

This website replaces my old blog, which was a Next.js site. I got tired of the monthly Dependabot spam and the relatively complicated hosting situation. The complexity of Next.js just isn’t necessary for a simple blog. The site you’re looking at now was generated with Hugo, which should require a lot less maintenance on my part and a lighter CPU load on your part. I’m hosting with SourceHut Pages.

I didn’t feel like saving the few posts from my old site, which you can access in Markdown format at the archived GitHub repository, including an unfinished draft article from 2022 outlining my plans for 2023. It hasn’t held up very well.

Ironically, the Next.js site replaced a previous Hugo site. I originally replaced Hugo for two reasons:

1. I was using a very complex third-party theme, which made it difficult to customize my site.
2. I was on the job market for a frontend position with no professional experience, so a Next.js site would highlight my skills better to recruiters.

For this iteration, I’ve written a theme from scratch, occasionally referring to Drew DeVault’s site as a syntax or configuration guide. Point #2 is no longer an issue. Although I’ll eventually be back on the job market, I anticipate that my resumé will be convincing enough without having to show off a flashy personal site.

I held onto the most unique design element from the Next.js site, the quotes feature. The old site required a quote on each post, while I’ve made the quotes optional here. Quotes are displayed exactly the same way as before.

The design you’re looking at now is definitely an early first draft¹. I’ll update the theme substantially as I write posts. In particular, I’m thinking about differentiating technical posts from non-technical posts. I might end up styling non-technical posts with a serif font and a different color, although the visual difference might be too jarring to pull off.

I’m using your browser’s default monospace font because I want to keep page size to a minimum, but readability on my Mac isn’t that great so I might end up having to bundle a font. I can promise that I will never add JavaScript to this site.