I redesigned this site just half a year ago. While I wasn’t unhappy with the results, I was pretty disenchanted with the state of Wordpress. So I ported the whole darn thing over to Hugo!

I ventured pretty far down the rabbit hole of another major design overhaul before winding my way back to the same basic look, this time with significant improvements to the quality of the CSS, the readability of the type, proportions of words and images, and so on.

Also, because Hugo is a static site generator and not a sluggish PHP application backed by a database1, page creation is done in advance, making the user experience wickedly fast. Static site generators, like 4-packs of cleverly-named beer in tall cans from the neighborhood brewery, are annoyingly on-trend but still totally cool.

For comment support (sold separately!), I evaluated a bunch of options and settled on Staticman. Respect for privacy and freedom from the Twitters and Facebooks of the world are core design values for this site, which ruled out a bunch of options. That left a few good self-hosted comment systems. Of those, all but Staticman required loading content with client-side Javascript talking to an API. The only disadvantage of Staticman is that comments can’t appear immediately.

I didn’t like the available migration tools for Wordpress, so in another moment of poor judgement, I wrote my own. Now you too can enjoy a Wordprexit crisis of your own making.

  1. Other Wordpress problems include: mediocre Markdown support, reliance on crappy third-party plugins for core features, Gutenberg, and PHP. In fairness, they do have a good comment system, and I continue to use their excellent Akismet comment-spam protection service. ↩︎