Blog Moved

If you’ve been in this blog before, you may wonder if it looks different or is just your imagination. Fear not! You are not going crazy, this blag has changed.

After something like 14 years using Blogger as a hosting platform, I have moved to hosting mostlymaths.net in Github pages, using hugo as a static site generator.

Some details

• I used a converter offered in Hugo’s webpage, that could convert from Blogger export XML to Markdown for hugo
• I settled on a customised Ananke theme. It’s a fully featured theme, and Hugo’s templating is easy to pick up
• I just had to change some DNS settings and have patience after this

Pain points

• I had 700+ blog posts. After a hardcore culling, I have around 290. Still, markdown needs cleanup, images need to be moved from Blogger to Github… There’s still a lot left (I have converted around 90 posts, the most popular or new)
• It was time consuming, since I had to get many things right ASAP (RSS, Google Analytics, bring back some of the Amazon ads, layout, design, etc)

Non-pain points

• Hugo’s templating is easy to follow. It was a relative breeze to make it look like it looks now
• Search was built using this Gist and fuse.js It works awesomely well

Niceties

• Having left Blogger means I can now add whatever crazy ~shit~ Javascript or CSS I want:
  • I have a minimap in long posts (hover around the left area, although that blog post is so long it makes the minimap cut off)
  • Dropcaps from Byrne’s Euclid by Nicholas Reougeux
  • MathJax where needed
  • Haven’t yet, but now I will be able to have fun again with D3.js and post my examples directly
• Having standalone static pages is now also easier. So far, there are none, but hey
• Writing Markdown is ❤️

Conclusion

• I should have done this a year ago, at least. It’s so much easier to handle now

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