What’s happened?#

To mark its fifth anniversary 🥳, I’m moving schallbert’s Blog onto a new technical foundation!

Image: side-by-side comparison of my website, once built with jekyll, and now built with hugo.

I have migrated this blog from Jekyll to the site generator Hugo. It was a major undertaking: I dedicated a large portion of my free time to it over the course of about four months. The lion’s share of that effort went into creating and refining the styling, adapting my content to the new environment, fixing broken links, and documenting the migration process.

Why did I do it?#

I was increasingly at odds with Jekyll: the main reasons were the numerous dependencies prone to frequent breakage, the ever-increasing build times, and the complex environment required for deployment to my server.

My site now builds about five times faster than before.

It loads less styling (CSS, JS), and the images are even more space-efficient.

Plus, I no longer have to keep Ruby and countless gems up to date.

When choosing a Hugo theme, I prioritized functionality over mere visual appeal. As a result, the site is now much simpler and more performant.

What’s in it for readers?#

Image: the RSS logo showing an orange frame with white lines and a dot, simplified like waves transmitted by a broadcast antenna.
RSS logo [1]

The blog now offers an RSS feed. Plus, my projects are now included in the tags view. Finally, the migration process spawned numerous articles; these are intended to make such a move easier for others than it was for me and to clarify Hugo’s structural concepts.

What’s left to do?#

I haven’t quite finished the overhaul yet:

  • Optimize the website for mobile viewing ✓
  • Enable centered display of images at native resolution ✓
  • Ensure the feed correctly displays article cover images ✓
  • Achieve a more consistent look via CSS (colors, image borders, etc.)
  • Make overview pages span the full screen width and display larger images
  • Add missing English translations ✓
  • Implement tags more specifically and with clearer distinctions
  • Add a sticky table of contents on the left-hand side

These pages will see further detailed improvements over the coming weeks. I’m looking forward to it!

schallbert