I’m very proud to have this new version of the site launched. It’s build on the same Hugo foundation as the previous one, so none of the URLs will have changed.

What’s new?

Admin interface

I’m writing this via the DecapCMS interface on my local machine. I’ve always wanted a GUI to write my blog posts, and this is definitely that. It’s config-driven, which doesn’t make it terribly attractive. But it works and takes me out of VSCode, which feels better.

Less Hugo nonsense

I had an extremely convoluted system of scratch variables that would let me bypass Hugo’s templating limitations to deliver things like Open Graph tags. Turns out that’s pointless! There’s an Open Graph template built-in. I can just use that.

With that better system implemented, I went looking at modern Hugo themes to see if I could find more best practices. I found a lot.

• Use the block keyword to store page content in a variable and enable a proper layout template instead of putting header and footer partials on every template
• Since this site only has one theme, don’t use a themes folder at all and put the layout folder at the root
• Create shortcodes for images in posts instead of hardcoded HTML

Tailwind

I had a viscerally negative reaction to Tailwind the first time I saw it. Having used it once at work, now I won’t style a site with anything else. It’s hard to explain why. I dislike the BEM method of naming classes, Styled Components outputs unreadable class names, but this method is great. Not perfect: I can’t use ampersands in nested classes, but the goal is to write a minimal amount of traditional CSS.

Links page

Making a links page felt like the most old-school thing I could do. We used to need curated lists of links to other good places on the Internet. Maybe new people still do. Still, it felt nice to decide on categories and make short descriptors for each site.

Projects page

I debated putting this into the blog, but it doesn’t quite belong. These are my larger projects that deserve their own dedicated page. I’m particularly proud of Starbase 80, which has over 200 stars on GitHub. People are definitely using it! The feature requests have dried up, which I’m concluding is a good thing. Maybe this bit of software is done.

YouTube and Mastodon

Part of the reason I started this whole rewrite was to feature my YouTube videos and Mastodon posts directly on the site. I wrote scripts to hit both APIs and transform that JSON into Hugo posts. But I couldn’t find a place to put them. They clutter the home page and are fairly prominent on that page and the projects page. So I cut them. But the templates are still there in case I find a good spot.

What’s next?

More blogging! My brain tells me I’m running dry on ideas, but I know that’s only until I get started. There’s a weird hypocrisy in AI commentary that I want to pick apart. I have a deep love of The Vergecast that I want to share. And I’m sure some video game will annoy or delight me into writing an article. Maybe it’ll be Starstruck Vagabond.