Changing the Scenery

An update to my personal site was long overdue. I had checked out a variety of different templates and open source web design systems to update my JyotishTools.com site. These included Bootstrap, Jekyll, and MiddleMan. I settled on Hugo as it was just an app to install and runs from the command line. With the other systems you need to make sure you had all the correct versions of Rails and Rake. Since Hugo is an app it takes care of all that and runs using Go.

I had also used Octopress for my JyotishTools.com blog but then found Michael Henderson’s port to Hugo of the Octopress theme. I’m also using it here with some modifications, specifically to make the site completely use relative addressing. Apparently most of the themes for Hugo are developed by folks who host sites on GitHub and it may not work well with relative addressing but my web host prefers it (plus it makes things simpler).

My previous JyotishTools site used PHP to build dynamic pages. Had someone with site building experience had looked over my shoulder about 10 years ago they would have asked why I was doing that? In the first place it made changes to the site simpler. Updates instead of authoring a whole page allowed for updating sections. But still the site was static so maybe I could have done that all locally using Python to build a page the same way and then upload the changed pages. Here around 10 years later and even better tools and languages that’s what I’m doing.

Another reason driving the change was that more and more of my JyotishTools.com users were logging in via mobile devices and so I wanted a theme with responsive design. Both JyotishTools.com and this site use themes that do that.