Back in Business
After my last post I tried to reincept this site using Hexo rather than Hugo.
But 2022 turned out to be a pretty busy year 😅
Between working a complex project for VMware Tanzu labs and trying to plan my next move wrt where to live (Denver isn’t it for me 🙃) I didn’t have much time to devote to this endeavor
My rationale was that while Hugo used Go Templates (which I’m not very familiar with), Hexo uses Embedded Javascript (EJS) Templates – which I’m also not very familiar with 😝, but I assumed might similar to Javascript which I use every day.
That hypothesis was invalidated 😅. It turns out EJS was about as intuative to me as Go Templates, and since most of Hexo’s community is in Chinese I wound up coming back to Hugo.
The exercise was pretty worthwhile though, IMO. As part of the ill-fated Hexo migration, I tried making a theme from scratch which forced me to consider what I valued in a static site theme.
I decided that my primary concerns were respecting my readers' privacy (no tracking at all), and presenting my content in a clean, minimalist interface. Stretch goals included customizable post taxonomies with unique layouts for different categories. In the end I decided to ditch the theme because the knowledge gap was too wide and I didn’t have enough time to prioritize closing it. And I wanted to make it easy for me to publish here sooner than later.
For this site’s facelift I chose the Slick Hugo theme, which is privacy focused and fully featured. That doesn’t mean I’ve finished Bikeshedding my website though 😄
Here’s a list of features I’d still like to implement:
Home Page is About Me post, not blog rollCompletely NoJS friendlyIndie Web support similar to (Indigo Theme)[https://web-work.tools/indieweb/indigo/features/]Dark Mode- Web Mentions support
Here’s hoping that 2023 seems more updates than 2022 😁