Apparently moving blogs is more fun than writing in it, at least for me.
There has always been three choices for blogging:
- Use WordPress.com platform: Pro: Easy Cons: Not on my domain, ads.
- Self-hosted WordPress: Pro Trusted platform, on my domain Cons: Maintenance
- Static site generator: Pro Simple Cons: Require learning new things
First, I hate maintenance WordPress installation. The update is very frequent, and sometimes the auto-updater doesn’t work. As a person who blog infrequently, in many occasion the WordPress update is way more frequent than my blog post. So the self-hosted WordPress is not an option anymore.
Let’s talk static site generator: When I set up my last blog in 2013, THE static site generator is Jekyll. And it’s Ruby. And I am primarily using Windows. You can probably guess where this is heading. (It gets much better now, though). And more, Jekyll looks complicated for a blog.
In the end, in 2013 I decided to use WordPress.com.
Now in 2016, and I decided to revamp my blog again. Now, I don’t like WordPress.com that much. Even with the new editor, I feel that things are very distracting (compared to me writing this blog post in Sublime Text). And free WordPress.com are limited in customization. Since 2013, there are a lot of progress on static site generator, and it changed from Cool Things™ to one of the standard way for website. So I look up what’s on the plate, and I found Hugo, which looks nice. Its content management feature immediately caught my attention (I remembered being confused by Jekyll content structure) so I give it a try. And in few hour, I have a new site!
Admittedly, Hugo is small compared to Jekyll, and it shows. I struggle to find a good theme for my website, and end up actually just creating my own theme base on purehugo theme (which is actually just a port of purecss blog layout). I ended up changing a lot, including completely rewritten the CSS, make markup more hierarchical (the old code use <h1> for date, and <p> for post title!), swap rainbowjs for hightlightjs, add more taxonomy support, add MathJax support, make things customizable with configuration, revamp pagination, add “Read more” link and add link to previous/next post. It is still not done though, as I still haven’t tackled the TOC and such.
It has been fun. Admittedly I haven’t really touch HTML/CSS for ages as lately I have my friend who is way more fluent in design working with me on that. My friend can probably do what I take 4 hours within just half and hour though.
Anyway, my new blog is on, and I hope to write more frequently. I already have a few things I want to write about, and several projects I have finished. See you then!