Moved to hugo
I moved my blog from blogger to Hugo. Blogger really did not evolve since Google take-over in 2003. Wordpress is today much nicer and prettier. It’s clear that Google did not invest at all, possibly because blogs are passé. Compared to mid 2000, there are very few blogs today. Even programming blogs are scarce. It could be interesting to quantify this. My theory is that it is the direct consequence of the popularity of social networks, and especially facebook (possibly also stackoverflow for programmers): people don’t have time anymore to write as their extra-time is used on social networks. Similarly I noticed that almost nobody comments anymore to the point that even Disqus is very rarely used, and again I attribute that to the popularity of sites like reddit. This is why I did not bother with a comment section on my blog, just email me or tweet about it instead.
I was always attracted by the static web sites concept, because there is actually very little things that ought to be truely dynamic from a individual point of view. Dynamic hosting also tends to be problematic in the long-run, for example I never found the time to upgrade my chord search engine to the newer Google appengine and now it’s just off. I used to freeze my personal website (created with a dynamic templating tool Velocity, django, etc.) with a python script. So a static blog was the next logical step, and these days, it’s quite popular. Static blogs put the author fully in control of the content and its presentation. Jekyll started the trend along with github allowing good old personal websites. It offers a modern looking blog, with very little configuration steps. I tried Hugo instead because it’s written in the Go language. It’s much faster, but I don’t really care about that for something of the size of my blog. I was curious however how good was the Go language on real world projects, and I knew I could always customize it if I ever needed to. Interestingly, I did stumble on a few panics (core dump equivalent where the program just crashes, in this case the hugo local server), something that does not happen with Java based tools or even with Ruby or Python based tools. Even though I like the Go language more and more (I am doing some pet project with it - I believe in the focus on fast compilation and simple language), I found this a bit alarming. This is clearly a result of the errors versus exceptions choice, as it’s up to the programmer to handle the errors properly and not panic unnecessarily (I even wonder if it makes any sense to panic for a server).
Anyway I think it looks better now, maybe a bit too minimalist. I’ll add details when I have more time.