Renewing the blog (again!)

It’s been 7 years!
Seven years I’ve resisted the urge to rewrite my blog with new frameworks.

But I did it anyway. Why? Because I needed to uniformize a little bit the website I’m maintaining. And because of the features it brings with it.

A bit of legacy

The last time I rewrote my blog, it was during the summer 2016 using Jekyll, Sass and a bit of CoffeeScript for the interactive parts.

It was my first experience with a static website generator, and I loved it. Why making a dynamic website when a static is enough?

Since then, I have maintained and made some updates to the blog, mostly focusing on UI and typography improvements, along with major Jekyll upgrades. However, I wanted to stop my “Jekyll exception”!

Go Hugo!

I’ve started using Hugo for more and more of my static websites, and it has become the best static website generator for my projects, like Padlok Marketing site, and Press Kit.

Just like those two websites (and many others), the deployments have been automated using Github workflows. So migrating from Jekyll to Hugo literally took no time at all from an OPS perspective.

Regarding the blog content, I’ve taken over the stories to add disclaimers when articles were really a bit too outdated and explained why. I also added metadata information to utilize a Hugo feature: Related stories.

Another feature is the estimation of the reading time. With it, you’ll know in advance what you engage yourself into.

Any stories will now come with up to two suggestions of related stories to read next! I hope they’ll help you find interesting content to read further.

Modernizing it!

Instead of Sass, the design is now powered with TailwindCSS. The typography rules are now using the Prose extension of tailwind; improving the readability a bit. Some parts of the design were modernized, while maintaining the overall identity.

Interactives features have been simplified and re-implemented with TypeScript over CoffeeScript. More modern, and type-safe, it was easier to bring those stories easter eggs alive again (like the interactive comparison above).

It might give me the crave to develop more of them for upcoming articles if I need them!

More accessible

With this new version, I also took care of using better practices with HTML to improve even more the accessibility of my stories, including the systematic usage of <figure>; but also by making sure that all features are visible at all time (like the anchor links that were previously hidden on the headings).

There is still room for improvement, so if you rely on accessibility features of the internet and you get trouble reading or enjoying a story, I’ll be very pleased to hear your feedback and fix it asap!

And then?

Even if building the blog is often considered to be the “fun part” as a developer, next steps are more into building some “worth to read” content.

I’ve recently started an Indie Diary story, and I’ll write #2 as the lesson learned from the upcoming Padlok update.

I’ll also continue to write development tips and how-to’s on various Apple platforms subjects when I feel like it’s interesting enough to be shared, because I do prefer producing less content that provide more value than the opposite.

Finally, in addition to the Atom feed, I’m thinking about building an ActivityPub integration to Hugo that would allow you to follow the blog on the Fediverse for new articles as soon as they become available. In the meantime, I always relay my new articles on my personal Mastodon account, so don’t be shy, and come say hi!