I am transitioning to a new blog host and new, well, everything regarding my blog. I had the following goals when creating this new blog site:

Remove dependence on blogger.com
Change the url. It’s now more common to not have “blog” in the url
Reduce the page size/number of requests
Improve the speed of the site (see above, plus CDN)
SSL everywhere

This is still a work in progress and the styling will be updated moving forward, but I’m a fan of dark themes, so this is roughly where I’m going.

As part of this change, I’ve embraced hugo as a static site generator. I like hugo for a number of reasons:

It’s fast
It requires no third party software (like Jekyl requires Ruby). Important since I might author in Windows, Mac, or online
It’s written in golang, which appeals to my inner tech core
It’s easy to use, especially with github gist support in 0.15!

My old authoring process was completely online in blogger. This site is now in github, so I can still author online or offline at any time. Publishing is still a work in progress and will be fodder for another post.

Things I’m thrilled about

The size/speed of the site is fantastic. When I host the site I’ll put things on a CDN as well, but I’m glad to go from 94 requests (and console errors):

To 2:

I also get to remove the dependency on SyntaxHighlighter. This is a great library but loading it all the time when I just needed it for certain posts was a bear. Instead, I’ll be using Github Gists.

Things I’m still tweaking

Font. I wanted to avoid a web font due to the extra request, but I’m not sure that’s possible. I’m just not happy with Arial/Verdana or Georgia on the Serif side
Sizing. I increased the font size from the original gindoro theme when tweaking my fork. Since the point is to have a blog, and the point of a blog is to read it, why not make the size relatively large? Anyway, I’m still tweaking spacing and such as a result.
Flair. The site might be minimal, but maybe a bit too minimal.
Comments. I’d like to enable comments without a lot of ceremony. Currently I don’t have comments, but am considering Disqus or Discourse

Things I want improved

I’d like for hugo to support explicit image sizing and relative urls for images. On this post, I had to specify the full public url on the image tags, and height/width directives do not pass through. Since hugo is open source, that would be a great pull request in my spare time.