It has been almost a year and a half since I have written my first blog post, and over half a year since I have written my previous post. My blog at that time was built with Hugo and used Netlify for hosting and automated deployment. Since that first post a lot of water has flown…

It Worked Until It Didn’t

The main thing that sparked the blog rework was Hugo failing to build the blog site. Of what use to a blogger is their blog if the blogger cannot even add a post to said blog?! Naturally, I have added a task to fix the blog to my TODO list, and left it at that.

Time went by, and I couldn’t be bothered to pick the task up… and the more I looked at this task, the more I questioned if fixing Hugo is what I want. Why not have Hugo replaced instead?

After all, I have learned a great deal of CSS and semantic HTML thanks to Jen Kramer. Namely, Jen’s courses on Frontend Masters¹ and #30DaysOfHTML initiative on Substack² and Twitter. I really wanted to put these skills to use, and hand-crafting my CV³ only reinforced that urge. HTML and CSS seem like such an obvious choice too! After all, every other tool ends up creating both of these.

Back to… Where I Started

This is where the original draft of this post that I have written back in May ends… I did implement a decent share of the blog in plain HTML and CSS. However, after that, I have decided to abandon that idea and go back to Hugo. Why did I decide to go back? Well, there are certain features that Hugo handles effortlessly. For example tags, templates, and partials. Making these work with HTML and CSS would either require a tremendous effort or introducing a tool to handle them, so I ended up going back to Hugo.

That’s the end of it right? Wrong! I still had to resolve the issues that I had with Hugo.

A New Beginning

Instead of simply trying to fix the problem with Hugo, I decided to use this opportunity to create my own site with Hugo from scratch. I did want to write some HTML and CSS after all! 😁

During implementation the idea to abstract HTML into a theme came along. This way semantic HTML is what the theme gives, but other than that it looks… awful! That’s how byocss: bring your own CSS name came to be - byocss gives you a HTML baseline, but you are supposed to bring in the styling.

Overall, the process took a lot of time. I am, however, really satisfied with these changes! I created something of my own and I have brought my blog back to the living! Additionally, I switched to tymek.dev domain that I had parked for a while now.

It is good to be back on track! 🚀