New year, new blog theme

Yes, I’ve made the classic mistake and re-started a writing habit by fiddling with the technology. Rather than, you know, actually writing something.

But I cringed every time I clicked a link to someone’s blogpost and saw they were using the same Hugo template as me (which, with ~13k stars, is a lot of people!)

When I bought this domain, I had zero frontend experience so had no choice but to just pick something full-featured off the shelf and hope it had everything I’d need. But over the past couple years building a startup, I’ve learnt enough web skills to be dangerous.

So this time I’ve started from scratch (hugo new theme) and implemented just enough functionality that I can publish this post. Lots is broken:

• No opengraph data that makes post links render nicely when shared
• A whole heap of other <meta> tags, some of which were probably important…
• Some missing images

I’ll fix those issues as and when they annoy me enough.

Is combining bunch of tailwind components really “your” theme?

No, at the moment tailwindcss-typography is doing almost the entirety of the work here: taking a bunch of <h2>, <p>, and <a> tags and applying some reasonably pleasant styling to them. But, over time I’ll tweak those defaults, add more functionality (table of contents support? tags on posts?)

There’s more than enough tweaks I can make that this will quickly evolve to be something unique-looking. Provided I actually write some more posts.