It was a great way to get started, but after having more and more issues with Hugo and the Blowfish theme, in June I decided to replace them with a custom site generator.
The trigger was finding that the only way to make certain changes that I wanted to make was to copy and modify Blowfish layouts. These were themselves quite complex and even unstable -- in the course of this work I updated Hugo and Blowfish to their latest versions and found that a couple of layouts that I had previously copied-and-modified had been broken by the update. These were not things that I cared to maintain going forward.
Meanwhile, I had found delaneyj/gostar and really like its native Go approach to constructing HTML. Go code that directly wrote HTML seemed both safer and easier to reuse than Go HTML templates that easily hide errors.
So over about a week, I replaced Hugo and my Blowfish templates with delaneyj/gostar-based code that renders this site. Initially, the look is the same, but I'm expecting that changes will be easier in the future, partly because I have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Blowfish used Tailwind CSS and while I don't love that, I've kept the Tailwind classes from my old Blowfish templates for the newly-rendered site.
Pros
- I have much tighter control now of everything! It's already been easy to make some simple improvements, like automatically adding section headers to pages that support Bluesky commenting, alphabetizing topics in topic lists, and modifying page backgrounds to use SVG instead of PNGs. I'm expecting to soon add support for standard.site lexicons.
Cons
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Hugo and Blowfish features that I wasn't using are now unavailable because I no longer use Hugo and Blowfish.
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There is more of my own code to maintain, but overall it is vastly smaller than the dependencies that it replaced.
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I'm still using TailwindCSS, which meant that I had to work out how to run the
tailwindcssCLI to generate my classes, which all seems like bloat and overkill for my small site.