New Website

I’ve moved to a new website generator, called Hugo. Quite simply, while I’m a huge fan of Pandoc, it seems to have lost the static blog generation competition. That’s because the other Markdown formats are getting better, or at least more flexible, while I thought I would have occasion to use things like Pandoc’s support for bibliographies and in-line citations.¹

The other killer feature Pandoc had, besides footnotes, was math support, but that seems to not be an issue for other Markdown-based site generators anymore. It’s not like I’m writing stuff like \(e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\) all the time, but it’s nice to know it’s an option. If only for the superscript support. Of course, I hardly ever write anything on this blog. Although somebody once said that the wireless extender on Linux post was useful, and can we really hope for anything more than usefulness?

I’m a little disappointed that this theme uses a heck of a lot more JavaScript than the old one did: Bootstrap and \(KaTeX\) and so on. But that’s probably okay, since basically everyone has at least Bootstrap cached nowadays. One of the funny things about websites is that they’re much larger than they used to be, which makes sense, since everyone has such amazing bandwidth. On the other hand, we do a lot of our browsing on devices with high latency, so maybe adding additional files isn’t such a great idea.

So, why did I change over?

1. I reinstalled the OS on my desktop, and my former site generator, Hakyll, no longer ran without modifications to the existing site configuration. It would take a while to figure it all out again, and the features and configuration language had changed.
2. GitLab provided a nice template that I didn’t need to actually make any changes to the layout for.
3. That everything just worked with math support and a relatively clean theme was a huge win.
4. Since Markdown seems to be the standard these days, I could move my (very few!) existing posts over without any effort at all. Even the front matter stayed the same.

I hope you like it.