It's been a while since I was using Nikola, so I decided to make the jump to Hugo. Because of two strong reasons. First, my website was still looking like the 90s, and second, Nikola was so damn slow. In comparison, Hugo is twice as fast. How, you ask? It has reduced the site's file size from a megabyte to almost one-fourth of it. But as you'll find out, that's not really the point of this post.
The point of this post is primarily "web design" and my takeaways from redesigning this site from scratch. As mentioned earlier, I switched from Nikola static website builder to Hugo. Then I decided to consult with my friend Dmitry Sazonov, who is a great C++ programmer and his experience in programming is 5 years longer than mine and he helped me to create a brief checklist of what my end goals should look like. Here they are:
- Reduce the size of the file.
- Use no CSS framework whatsoever.
- Use CSS Grid and flexbox, instead.
- Responsive design so that it can be browsed on both mobile and desktop.
- A color palette which is common, from which we're going to borrow.
- Sans serif fonts as the font.
- No media queries.
- No use of JavaScript (unless I had the requirement to embed something from another website)
But unfortunately, I wasn't able to meet all of the end goals.
First off, things fell apart for flexbox and CSS grid. For the starters, these are excellent for layout until you want the website layout to automatically flip from horizontal to vertical. But I wanted to keep the sizing logic to a bare minimum. And on top of that, I intended one to solve the problems via CSS Media Queries.
Next, I nearly won the responsiveness battle but fell short by a small margin. There's a lack of resize property, but the mobile experience is as close to a desktop as it could get, but not complete after all.
I won on GDPR tracking. I don't intend to collect any information. Also, I don’t run any form of ads that use cookies and all. But unfortunately, the chroma/pygments syntax in Hugo which is a generator was unable to handle very basic constructors or C++ like Args…. Same goes for using class over typename in template parameters, which leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Speaking of RSS feeds, there will be no more of the categorization of RSS feeds going forward. Because the effort required for its code generation was simply just not worth it. Moreover, I got to know that Mozilla Firefox has dropped support for RSS too.
The newly updated website is hosted on the same Dreamhost shared hosting that I had since 2008. I had put some efforts into backend tools and updated a few git hooks.
As Dmitry Sazonov believes, website redesigning is going be a continuous process, and I'll be implementing new features and functionalities now and then. Concluding, I never want to do this ever again. Because I spent months relearning web technologies and few new tools but wasn't able to write all of them during the period. Looking into the future, I want to put more of that into practice.