Hello, World!

Hello World!

This is version 3 of hugopoon.com, created on 2023-04-05.

Why 3 versions in 2 years?

The beginning

Version 1, created on 2021-05-29, was a static site generated with Hugo (but of course) using the “smol” theme. It was hosted on Github Pages and was done purely for the sake of having some sort of homepage; I’d had this domain registered since 2014(?) and had simply never done anything with it: it existed only to reserve my little namespace on the World Wide Web before someone else got to it.

Curiouser and curiouser

Version 2, created on 2022-08-20, was the result of a few ideas coming together:

• I had been getting increasingly curious about Django and decided to do something about it (i.e. make a website).
• I wanted to get a VPS and do Cool Things with it (nothing public-facing, don’t bother searching) like try out Firefly-III for accounting.

Firefly-III didn’t work out in the end — I found the way it handles Accounts Receivable particularly hard to grasp, and ended up going to GnuCash — but Django is mostly lovely.

The main challenges for me:

• Getting Gunicorn and systemd to play nicely and actually work consistently (the main point being to have Django start automatically when the website is loaded, even immediately after a reboot).
• Python’s dependency management.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of frustration was when I ran some updates and, probably in a moment of inattention, changed the Python version in my virtual environment; it took me over an hour googling those error messages to realise that I needed to be on Python 3.8 because something or other hadn’t yet been updated to work on 3.10 (or something like that).

In that hour, I also found myself looking at options for doing all this in Rust: a statically linked binary is pretty appealing in such circumstances….

I fixed the problem and had a working website again — this all happened in 2023-01, I think — but it kept bugging me that I had this setup that was clearly so much more fragile than it needed to be: I don’t even write blog posts on any regular basis (much though I’ve liked the idea of doing so over the last 15 years).

I decided I needed to go back to basics.

Back to basics

So here we are.

The design is intentionally primitive. I find myself increasingly frustrated with load times, especially when the main content is just text.

There is also an element of (misremembered?) nostalgia for the Good Old Days when I was young and HTML mystified me.

I also really don’t like the current trend of flat design and low contrast. I really started noticing it when I got an e-paper monitor (Dasung Paperlike HD). Here, then, links look like links, and that drop-shadow in the menubar is my nod to a time when buttons looked like buttons — and when web browsers didn’t use a white background by default.

and back in time?

There is also another motive for simplifying things: so I can complicate them in another way.

Baardi55 described a setup to mirror a Hugo site as a Gemini capsule, linking guides from Sylvain Durand and Stéphane HUC as references. Stéphane HUC even describes mirroring on Gopher.

It may be another year before I get around to any of this, but it would be cool.