Posted on 2022-10-27

Read Time: 3 minutes | 469 words

Not Really a Revamp?

So I have moved to a new theme which is my old theme rebuilt for a new engine. Is that a revamp?

I originally built this theme for the pelican static site generator when I moved to pelican from Ghost. It’s inspired, in fact, by an now defunct version of an Eston theme that I had purchased for that Ghost site mixed with a bunch different things that I liked. Once I got the design where I wanted, it became was my primary site theme for several years. When I moved to Hugo, though, I decided to adopt a new Hugo-styled theme.

That didn’t turn out as well I hoped. The Hugo theme I was using was nice. In fact, it was so nice that I kept running into it on different sites. While occasionally jarring, its popularity wasn’t really an issue. I had already customized the color and behavior to fit my needs. One of the reasons I like starting with a pre-built theme is that it allows thats sort of tweaking while providing a good way to learn about the structure of the software itself. That worked, for a bit, but no matter how much I kept tweaking, I was never really satisfied.

I wanted my old theme back, so I bit the bullet and adapted it.

It was a bit of an undertaking, but I definitely feel a lot more comfortable creating themes in Hugo, now. I shoud also say that while the theme may be ready for my site, it isn’t a full ready-to-deploy theme. I specifically coded it for me. It doesn’t have all the cool bells-and-whistles that a theme in the Hugo theme showcase would have. I am okay with that, though. I think we forget that one of the cool things about development is that we can make things just for ourselves. I am happy with what I built. That said, I certainly don’t mind if people borrow pieces. After all, I borrowed heavily in designing this.

There were a lot of challenges - some Hugo related1 and some just a feature of my build environment. Overall, the adaptation took a couple days of solid work. Again, this is to get it to an MVP status for this site. I was able to clean up a lot of old code. There are still some fixes I want to add in, but I can do that as I go.

I am still pondering re-adding comments to the site. It feels like more work than it is worth, but the idea of moving back to local networks on personal sites is one that I am warming to - even it does require significant moderation.

Those decisions are for another day.


  1. Really grokking the “.” context took me more time than I’d like to admit. ↩︎

Author: Geoffrey Gimse

Tags: #site_updates  #hugo 

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