Making of this blog#

I’ve created this blog in a few days of rather casual effort. Here’s the (not particularly interesting) story.

Why?#

I have already a Substack for posting some of the things I wanted to put here, but the format doesn’t fit precisely what I always need or want. First, not everything can or needs to be its own post (see for example my Projects page, it’s nice to have those get their own separate permanent space). Second, I don’t like Substack’s formatting and it doesn’t give me the freedom I get from writing Markdown in my own customized layout. For example Substack still doesn’t support inline math rendering. $E = mc^2$. See Substack? It’s not hard!

How?#

With Hugo, mainly. I’d considered alternatives like Eleventy but ultimately I like its combination of flexibility and simplicity more; it’s great for rolling out a simple static site with a given template (of which it offers many), but also powerful when it comes time to customize it. It can still require a bit of fidgeting but having AI agents helped me set things up very straightforwardly without spending too much time to figure out the details. The only customizations I really needed was adding support for MathJax (that’s a very well-established trick), including Bootstrap icons, and including support for Giscus. Speaking of which - finding out about Giscus also really gave me a push here. A blog without comments section felt a bit empty, but also, I don’t really want to pay for hosting while my blog is just a barebones personal affair and Github Pages is an option. Disqus was the obvious possibility but it suffers from the issue of being laden with tracking code and ads. But for a developer’s blog that doesn’t expect much traffic, having comments simply require a Github account is perfectly fine, and this allows me to have them both for free and without any extra burden.

What now?#

I might port some of my older Substack posts, or add new stuff first. I expect I’ll still cross-post stuff to Substack, mostly because the ability to subscribe there might make it easier for someone to follow if so they desire (hah!). Still, some things I’ll probably only post here if I think there’s no real way for me to also make them work on Substack.