Things have changed.

Or not, if this went poorly

It has been a few years since I’ve changed something with this site, and it was time.

In early 2016 I switched to Hugo, from Octopress. This was done because Hugo seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it, and boy was it much faster to generate a site.

Before that, in 2013 it was from Wordpress to Octopress. This was my first push into a static site vs a big publishing platform that required a bunch of resources I no longer had at my disposal. Remember, I was running this out of my house. In my garage. Where a summer heatwave would kill my server and I had to rebuild from scratch.

And then there were a series of failed experiments like Moveable Type, Roller Weblog (which originally came out of Sun Microsystems) to finally Wordpress.

Over all of that time, I’ve found I really need a few features to make me happy and want to continue writing entries.

• Speed. I really need this site to load fast. There is no driver behind it, its just something I feel strongly about. Users should not have to wait for databases, a bunch of javascript to run, or fetch images from a slow backend.
• Security. Managing plugins and vulnerabilities with a full PHP/Wordpress/Apache/SQL stack is a full-time job. I like that I can write this on anything, deploy to a bucket, and my CDN picks it up and manages the HTTPS/TLS termination. It costs $4 a month.
• Pictures. I like pictures, and I like to share them. Whatever I use has to have some rudimentary image support.
• Syntax highlighting. I share a lot of terminal snippets and code examples. It has to look pretty.
• Tags. Formally Categories here, but I like to have a way to collect related posts.
• Ease of use. This is all done in a tmux session with vim. I used to think a wysiwyg editor was preferable but after years of not having one, I do prefer this.
• Wide post body. This one is what finally prompted the latest change.

I’m switching themes, because I just could not handle the narrow article section in the base16’s CSS. I tried fiddling with it a few times, and I could never get it right.

The theme I’m using now has a configurable parameter for the article body width, and I think its the bees knees.

This theme also seems to not inject html escape characters in my image captions,

What I’m dropping:

• Categories. I’ve moved to Tags. This was a holdout from my Wordpress migration. I tried to preserve a lot of the URLs and content for the sake of whoever links back to this place, but I prefer the tag terminology.
• Image shadowbox. It was a custom js library and shortcode I was maintaining, and it was only because images shoved in the narrow 832px body section were too small for my liking.

So here is to a new coat of paint.