Posts Tagged "Hugo"

A few months ago, I decided to redesign my personal site again, after previously unifying the design of the various (mostly inactive) blogs I was operating in 2023. Here, I want to discuss a little of the motivation behind rebuilding from scratch, and the process it took to get here.

Why a full rewrite?

Since I had an existing custom theme, coffeeline, it may seem a strange decision to rip everything down and build from scratch. There were a few factors involved, but the largest (by far) is simply that the content I want to display on my site has drastically changed in the last three years.

At the point of unifying my blogs, I was in my penultimate year of university and in the throes of a job search, which unfortunately resulted in the landing page for my site becoming a defacto CV. Now gainfully employed (in this economy!) and out of university, this makes little sense. I want people to see the things I’m writing, not an executive summary of my very short career.

One other factor is the state of my prior custom theme. The 2023 site design is a hackjob consisting of an existing open-source Hexo theme, bits and pieces adopted from other blog designs, and a heap of small hacks and shortcodes to achieve a consistent look across the set of existing posts. Put bluntly, it was a mess.

Hello! If you’re viewing this site after 21st June, 2023, you may notice that the design of this site has changed. In fact, if you’re viewing any of my blogs, you may notice that they have all changed, be it my programming blog, Gengo! 言語 or 脇道の看板. To explain why this all happened in the first place, I’ll present a little bit of backstory.

The Backstory

I’ve run several different blogs for several different purposes for quite a number of years. First came my programming blog, which has always been on the apex domain of the site you’re currently on, c272.org. From 2016 onwards, I continued to (infrequently) update the site and its design up until late 2018, adding posts about various programming projects I was working on at the time, and creating a fair few cringeworthy articles, which have thankfully been lost to time.

Fast forward three years, however, and I wanted to start writing about topics other than programming on my site. One large factor in this was that I began learning Japanese and eventually decided to take on the JLPT N1, which motivated me to write about some of the interesting topics I had come across in my language learning process. However, I wasn’t about to suddenly start posting completely unrelated content onto my main blog, which had (up until this point) been entirely programming focused. Also, I wanted to start writing Japanese language content, which obviously wouldn’t fly in the same post feed as English language programming articles.