Since the last time I blogged, I’ve graduated from Columbia and have thus lost access to my previous blog setup. I was content to ignore my blog entirely and let it languish, but I was recently asked to post some notes on the Gaussian distribution and decided to resurrect my blog (the person was sort of drunk and might not have been serious, but that’s ok).
Unfortunately, I could not find the backups of all of my previous posts. I have saved the old posts that I could find, but there are several posts that are no longer present. Honestly, that’s probably for the better – I’m sure the things I wrote in my freshman year of colleg eare horrendously embarassing.
I decided to take the opportunity to start fresh, using an entirely new
blogging layout and software. Previously, I wrote a custom blogging
setup using Asciidoctor and Frozen
Flask. Frozen Flask
works well (and I definitely recommend for really custom static
websites), but my blog is pretty simple and it’s kind of a drag to use a
custom software stack that I kept forgetting how to use. Instead, I
chose to use Hugo, a popular and (more
importantly) well-documented static website generator that takes care of
pretty much everything for me. And while I appreciate the expressivity
of the asciidoc markup language, AFAICT no one else uses asciidoc at
all, including me in every other part of my life. Moving back to
markdown, something I use on an almost daily basis, was actually a plus.
My new blog post is written using a Markdown + Latex (for math) dialect
that hits the perfect sweet spot of useability, simplicity, and
expressivity.
Because I was already starting over from the software side, I decided to redesign the design of the blog from scratch (I’ve come to mildly dislike my previous design). This time, instead of blindly copying someone else’s theme, I decided to “hand-code” the entire website. For the first time in my life, I actually wrote every single line of CSS on this website (although I used the Ezhil Hugo Theme as a guide). I’m quite proud of the result and how minimal it is. Other than KaTeX for math, I have no JavaScript and only 58 lines of CSS (<800 bytes uncompressed).