Background

I set this site up back in Feb 2019, probably as an experiment to see what GitHub pages was all about. Don’t recall what the verdict was, but I was just sitting on it for the next year or so.

I moved over to Hugo and PaperMod in Nov 2020, and have stayed put ever since. I upgraded the versions just once in the last 4 years.

Over this period, I built up quite a list of things-to-do. But, revamping the site always remained a backlog item, until earlier this month.

Updates

Basics First

The first order of business, before diving into any of the customizations, was to upgrade Hugo, PaperMod, and GitHub actions to their latest versions. There were a few hiccups, but hey, this site project is still very much a pet, so some effort is a given!

Customizations

PaperMod is a nice, clean and minimal theme out of the box (🙌 kudos to all the contributors!). I didn’t have any particular reason to look around, as I was pretty happy with it. However, I still wanted to simplify it some more. Things like a post’s metadata, listing of posts on pages like Home, Posts, Notes (more on this specific section later) etc.

Apart from a new Notes section, some other changes on the site are, a new simplified post list, search and posts now show updated timestamp.

Posts vs Notes

Like almost everyone else, I have probably taken thousands of notes over the years. Unfortunately, I never really paid much attention to where I was saving them. A lot of these from the inital years got lost with job changes since they were mostly local to the work machine. Later down the road, I added some to git gists. But, I always found myself coming back to local notes simply due to their ease of use.

The more I thought about it, the more I started leaning towards Git as the solution which could help me centralize them, as well as offering other benefits like backups, version control, syncing between devices etc. Using VS Code, I can easily work with a local copy of these notes.

I hear ya! but, why publish ’em? You ask.

I don’t recall how, but one fine day, I found myself reading Maggie’s post about something referred to, as a “Digital Garden”. Reading through it, I realized I wanted to write more, but often ended up with a rough outline of a post, the main ideas etc, but that’s where it then remained. I couldn’t get myself to complete these posts in a way which would make them an acceptable “blog post”. By nature, most of these unpublished notes were imperfect, and ever evolving. I found myself going back to them often, when I found something useful, that was related to the original idea. At times, I even split them out as more information was added, and a new direction emerged.

Probing further, I wanted to understand, what was it that was making me write these posts? Was it to keep up with the “tech” world or something for future me? Admittedly, there was an element of the former when I first started this personal blog. But, over the past few years, most of the posts have been the latter kind. Something I thought would prove useful for future me.

If that’s the case, then these posts need not really follow the personal blog template, I reasoned, and strictly speaking, these aren’t even posts anymore. But, just notes!

Publishing these notes here helps make them available to me (and anyone else interested in the topic), and also triggers what Maggie calls “Learning in Public”. Secondly, (and this relates to another of Maggie’s post) with the proliferation of Gen AI, the web is probably going to drown in well-written and polished blog posts. Imcomplete, and imperfect notes then, will help distinguish humans from the bots in the not-so-distant future.

Publishing Notes

Once I had decided to publish my half-baked ideas, my obvious thought was to publish it via GitHub pages, same as this site, albeit through a different repo. Such a setup would allow me to choose a more purpose built theme for notes. Something which will be able to showcase how they link to each other, and help create a mindmap of sorts. However, I quickly dropped that idea seeing my past performance on this site. I can’t expect my future self to keep maintaining 2 different sites, when my past self couldn’t find the time to maintain 1!

So, I started researching on what Hugo offers in terms of essentially maintaining 2 different types of content under the same site. Thankfully, Hugo’s documentation is pretty straight forward, and their discourse is a great place to ask for help. I realized, all I needed was to create a new section on the site, and also a different taxonomy that wouldn’t interfere with the existing one for posts (tags). Maybe, future me will merge both these together and still find a way to meaningfully display both types of content! 🤞

Anyway, with most of the steps identified, it was time to set the ball rolling. I reckon it took me about a weekend’s worth of tinkering to get the site to where it is now. And probably the same to write this all up!

Closing Thoughts

Phew, that was a loong post!

To be honest, it didn’t feel as long when I was actually making these changes, or even writing about them. I kinda enjoyed the process. Well, did I mention, I love tinkering? Haha, maybe that explains it.

Anyway, with these new changes, I hope to externalize more things and make ’em more useful in the longer run.

Thanks for stopping by!