The Return
I have updated this site to start writing more about what I am working on. I originally intended this site to be only about goings on with skarva the llc but I think I want to also just include any kind of interesting thing I am doing or learning about that relates to tech. After falling down the rabbit hole watching The Primeagen and Theo videos and streams I got inspired to dive into web a little bit again but keep things lean and allow myself to make something fast. This site hadn’t been touched in a couple years so it felt like the right kind of project to use as a springboard to learn something new. I wanted something wasn’t overly complicated which meant, sorry Theo, no JS related frameworks. It just felt like too much to learn only to apply it to a simple personal blog site. It would’ve worked but I think at the cost of a fun experience for myself, and that’s what I really wanted. I wanted web dev to feel fun for once (and also not get in the way too much with my other projects). Primeagen had harked about Go and HTMX.
Don’t pass Go
It was intriguing as I had tried Go once before about a decade ago, and didn’t think it was too bad. I wasn’t sold on HTMX, not for this particular project anyway, so I decided to grab GoLand and jump into relearning Go! The basic were somewhat familiar, and reading about the routing stuff built in felt nice, and similar to Flask so I had the bonus of not needing to wrap my head around any concepts really, and the templ template engine seemed neat. I felt pretty content and that I wasn’t spinning my wheels trying to make baby steps; maybe I had made the right choice for myself! Though it still felt a little off. I just wanted to get to the content and front end design part of the site refresh, and decided to try to save more time by looking at some quick frameworks that let me get to the aspects I wanted. Given that it was a blog I leaned more towards static site gen, had a brief crisis of fools and thought about jumping back to Flask, and then found Hugo and decided to stop pondering about what language and/or framework to use, just stick with my choice, and learn it.
Hugo Big or Hugo Home
So that is pretty much where I am at the moment. Hugo has been pretty nice once I got a grip on how it works and got to work. This current site refresh is using Hugo and I did check out Vercel given Theo’s strong recommendation and their support for easy Hugo site deployment but I landed with Fly.io for its simplicity and clicks with me better. I particularly enjoy being able to write Hugo page contents using markdown as I am so used to using it over the years from writing documentation or note apps like Obsidian. It mostly stays out of the way, the draft/dev portion has live updating which is a treat, and deployment seems easy though I haven’t faced that portion of the user experience yet. All in all, it has certainly help spark a new joy with doing simple web development and is encouraging me to do more in it as well as have a more online presence a la this blog. Not wanting to lose too much time to re-learning CSS or creating the site general, I wanted to go for an incredibly simple and clean design. I watched some videos from Juxtopposed making use of their site Realtime Colors to help get started with the basics. For some reason while playing around with the design the concept of an eclipse kept getting stuck in my head which is where the backlit look comes from.
What’s Next
We shall see where the winds take me from here though. I am hoping back to my other projects; learning wood and metal working, working on a Godot game that is a mix of Descent and a rogue-lite, and my regular contributions to elementaryOS with OS8 around the corner and spearheading the rewrite of the Photos app.
I plan to update my photo site as well! Haven’t decided if I will do it with Hugo as well so I can do it fast or use it as an excuse to look into something new for dynamic web pages (honestly Elixir and Phoenix seem really cool and interesting) that I can then share with friends whom are not programmers, but artists, if they are interested in having their own portfolio site or site for handling commissions. That option is very appealing to me because I truly love creating tools that help others prosper in their passions.