website/content/posts/redesigning-my-website.md

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Redesigning My Website 2021-10-24T19:25:13-05:00 I finally finished redesigning my website using Hugo post
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My old website sucked. Like, for real. It was a bit of hard-written HTML plus a Jekyll blog, and it was a huge pain to update and maintain. GitHub kept randomly emailing me about various security vulnerabilities in some Ruby dependency of Jekyll, and hard-written HTML can only get you so far before you rage-quit.

So what now? Well, I did write a different site using the Hugo static site generator, howtuwu, and it turned out really nice. Hugo written in Go (of course) and compiled to a single binary, so no more worrying about Ruby dependencies! And writing in Markdown is a whole different level than HTML and actually kind of fun. No one ever said writing HTML is fun. So, why not rewrite my personal website in Hugo too?

I started by searching for a Hugo theme. Almost by accident, I discovered the Gokarna theme, and I have to say, I absolutely love it. It has everything that I need: icons for my various accounts, tags that actually work, an RSS feed, and dark mode. With my personal Gokarna fork, it's perfect. I even managed to sneak in this from my old blog:

404 ... You've reached an imaginary page!
Please rotate your computer 90 degrees and try again.

Currently, the new site is deployed to GitHub pages using a GitHub Action, while a development version (bleeding-edge not-yet-pushed Git commits!) is hosted on exozyme.

This morning, I finally finished moving my old blog posts over to this new site. The difference between hard-written HTML and Jekyll is pretty big, but in my opinion, the difference between Jekyll and Hugo is even bigger. I finally have a slick website that's aesthetic, lightweight, and easy to maintain!