A New Site!

I’ve been meaning to replace my site and blog for a while, and there’s never a better time than the Christmas holidays. I created my old site nearly a decade ago, and while it doesn’t look that bad, it doesn’t look good either:

The main thing that was stopping me from replacing it was finding the time to make my own theme so that my website stood out from others. However, my front-end web development and design skills are rusty at best, and I don’t find it very enjoyable!

I started off my trying to write a custom Zola theme for publishing blog posts, mainly because it seemed like an easy-to-understand static site generator, at least compared to something more complex like Hugo. I got as far as a simple site:

I soon abandoned this blog, though. I found myself needing to add more and more features every time I wrote a post, and so I didn’t end up posting anything!

After a while, I realised this was a ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ situation and gave myself permission to just use someone else’s theme. The most important thing to me was having somewhere to post content and link to, rather than having a unique or memorable theme. So I picked Hugo since I’d used it at work before, and the Congo theme was the sort of feel I was looking for. I can always make some customisations later if I want, or even switch the whole theme out if it sours on me.

Writing content was a breeze - it took me only a few minutes to write an about page copy over the one blog post from my last site, without having to worry about styling images or code blocks.

I’m using Cloudflare Pages linked with a private GitHub repo for free hosting and automatic publishing as soon as I push to the main branch. I might want to figure out a more ergonomic way of making new posts than VSCode and Git commits, but I’ll save that for another day.