Fresh coat of paint

Feb 7, 2024 (last edited Feb 15, 2024)

After months of writing my own website’s code in Go with templates and routing, I’ve come to a very funny realisation - I was basically re-inventing the wheel.

Because what I ended up with was basically a… dynamic static site generator? And since I wasn’t using the dynamic part of it at all, it was time to migrate to a proper solution. I picked Hugo because it was written in Go it has large support and seemed simple enough.

So, what’s new? Basically everything! The most important change is, of course, move to plain HTML. This should speed up site load somewhat, and give me easier time hosting it on my server (down to just 3 lines in Caddyfile from a whole script involving screen). This inevitably lead to some “minor” layout changes, e.g reviews moving around and some pages disappearing. But I will try to iron that out in the coming days/weeks/[units of time].

Other smaller but notable changes are those to CSS. Firstly, the colours have been made ever so slightly warmer. The previous design felt sterile and artificial, this should hopefully fix that. Secondly, I made the decision to remove NotoSerif font and rely on browsers’ defaults. Since it was a fairly generic-looking font, user experience shouldn’t be affected. This saves ~500kb of data, or around 8 times more than rest of the site combined!