The past

Static content generators like Hugo or Hexo are quite popular these days. Nine out of ten personal blogs you see on the Internet use them. Of course, they have so many different themes and some of these themes are classics now (e.g. Hexo NexT).

I used to depend on Hugo and its Mini theme. Hugo is fast (compared with Hexo), and Mini theme is small yet powerful, which should be a very nice tool for writing blog. So what makes me change that completely?

Motivation

We have to talk about my homepage (https://ononoki.org) first. Long time ago, I used another theme called Coder with Hugo for that, and it's pretty good for a navigation homepage.

But then I read some articles about website simplicity (like this one: https://bestmotherfucking.website). And I found that the external fonts and unclean HTML and CSS are really annoying. I cannot bear them. So, I went to 512kb.club and found a perfect website (at least I think so at that time): https://www.karl.berlin.

That site is really small, but it's pretty. It has a blue navigation bar and centered layout. It's so good that I fell in love at first glance. So I used its CSS and wrote the HTML by myself. That's how my several-days-ago homepage come from and look like.

But there was still an issue: the homepage and blog have completely different styles! Remember that the blog still used Mini theme from Hugo, which had untidy elements. I told myself: I will unify the two sites when I get enough free time.

And yesterday happened to be the time.

Composition now

I've said a little in the about page. The basic CSS framework is from Bulma, a Bootstrap alternative (yet I think Bulma is better). Its compressed size is 23.3 KiB (Brotli, compression level 6). Definitely not small, but also not too large.

The syntax highlighting is powered by highlight.js. I carefully chose the languages I may use, and the JS compressed size is 31.3 KiB (Brotli, compression level 6). I admit it's a little large, but I think it's worth it. There are lightweight solutions like lolight, which only weights 1.41 KiB after compression (still Brotli, compression level 6), but it's hardly under maintenance now (last commit on its GitHub repo is on 2020/7/25).

The comment system keeps the same, still Waline, which is just great.

BTW, I changed the 512kb.club badge to 250kb.club for the homepage, since 250 is smaller than 512. 😜

Conclusion

I really do think this fresh new look is much better than the old one. It makes this blog more lively and also let me have more motivation to write posts. 😁