I rewrote my site. Why?
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I rewrote my site. Why? To put it simply and honestly:
- I was a little tired of the near-minimalism. This wasn't enough for a full rewrite, but
- I'm not using Golang a lot, but I am using more Next.js and React for projects.
My static site was built with Hugo with Tailwind for styling. Now my site is based off of the Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog, but modified heavily to my liking. Ironically, the author of this template was inspired by one of the more complex and complete Hugo templates and kept the Hugo frontmatter, which totally worked in my favor as I shifted articles over.
What did I keep?
- Most of my posts
- Tailwind
- Surprisingly, Vue for a couple of posts and p5 for a few others
- Semi-hidden tags
- Using S3 to host images
What did I throw out?
- Hugo and its templating engine, Golang, and fully static pages
- Minimalism
- Career timeline. This was just a duplicate effort from LinkedIn.
- Building any new tools in Vue
- Dark-mode (for now)
- Probably the minimal footprint. I was proud of the <100kb size (minus the art) of the first site.
- Static html file hosting through S3
- Stability. Hugo has been rock solidly stable for the last few years with few if any breaking changes.
What's new?
- Neobrutalism(-ish). Colors! Fun!
- Next.js
- React with Typescript
- kbar search (cmd + k or use the search in the navbar)
- Search through articles on the main page
- MDX
- Dynamic routes, eg being able to create an api or complex app on this site
- Hosting on Vercel
Notes
- I was able to embed
- Vue apps on SRE and Linear Clock
- WASM-compiled Golang on Learning Golang, with a demo
- p5.js on Ripples and P5.js Demo
- but these don't always load correctly. Refresh while on the page. I'll have to fix that soon.
- Adding a search to my site was on my todo list for a long time, and it's here now!
- MDX wasn't on my radar, but I'm loving the ability to add components in otherwise plain markdown files. I was getting a similar but worse capability with partials in Hugo.
- I originally chose Hugo for its relative simplicity and speed and that I could get familiar with Golang to a degree. I've been using so much more Ruby, Elixir, React, and Python lately.
What do I expect out of this?
This switch addresses some of the limitations I was feeling with my static site. I wanted to build a few more tools, but needed some sort of backend and more dynamic frontend. I expect I'll be better able to build these things in a stack that I'm using frequently.
I want to have more fun with my personal site.