I spent a few weeks in August rewriting this website, and as promised here are the deets. The source code is available here under the MIT license.

Background

When I initially put this website together in January 2018, I used Julio Pescador’s Hugo port of the Future Imperfect theme. I’d heard good things about Hugo, I wanted to write blog posts in Markdown, and it was a good-looking theme that required minimal additional setup. It served me well for over a year, but a few things kept bothering me:

1. The styling was very difficult to modify – it was nearly 3000 lines of CSS in a single file, with many duplicated colours and styles.
2. The theme relied on a lot of JavaScript libraries: jQuery, highlight.js, Fancybox, Skel…
   1. My simple static website was serving up hundreds of kilobytes of largely unnecessary scripts. As someone who grew up using a dialup modem, this offended me.

My goal was to rewrite the Hugo theme for extensibility and performance, and I figured it would take maybe a week. Of course, it took about 3 times that.