Changes to this website

If you came to this website before you will notice a quite different design now.

I’d like to explain why I implemented these changes and how I did it.

It started when I stumbled across the Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web in the footer of Karl Voit’s website. The manifesto includes several recommendations the first one being “Return to vanilla HTML/CSS”. My previous theme was already fairly minimal, but still included Javascript and a number of CSS files and I decided to search for a Hugo theme that doesn’t require any Javascript and also easier CSS.

I looked at several and found hugo-simple which seems like a good fit. The theme is easy to understand and change. Ensuring maintainability is another point from the Manifesto that is quite important. Matt Campbell’s comment on Mastodon that providing a reading time isn’t appropriate sounds reasonable to me. A nice by-product is that the new theme doesn’t mention any reading time.

The theme is built for a blog only but I wanted to keep the projects section and this required a few changes.

• list.html had simple a loop through all posts independent of the type. I created a new partial list-item.html and copied code from the minimal theme.
• My blog posts use the section “posts” not “blog”. This was a simple change in single.html. Similarly the pagination had hard-coded the words “Newer posts” and “Older posts”. I removed “posts”.
• I prefer a different 404 page.
• The theme already includes a custom_head.html that I used to add a google verification setting.

At the moment I don’t follow all the rules from the manifesto but at least these

• Return to vanilla HTML/CSS (taking Hugo into account that generates vanilla html)
• End all forms of hotlinking
• Stick with native fonts
• Eliminate the broken URL risk

I want to look into “Don’t minimize that HTML” and “Obsessively compress your images” but don’t know yet how to do that.

I’m not convinced the “Prefer one page over several” rule helps.

Thus I won’t add the Manifesto footer.

Final changes were

• setting security headers ✔ (even though initially it broke the syntax highlighting).
• adding a favicon ✔ (I used RealFaviconGenerator which was easy to use and delivered what I needed)

Now I should focus on creating more posts.