I switched from my old and beloved hugo-dusk theme, to the new flashy and shiny PaperMod theme.

Why?

The old theme development has been dropped and I was basically maintaining it myself. I added some (debatably) cool stuff to it, but it was time to let it go.

Moreover, the new theme has really nice features, such as:

  • Introduction in home page to brag about my social status and career achievements
  • Per-year archive, allowing stalkers to dig easilly in my past
  • Search full-text fuzzy functionality, which I still need to figure out how to disable
  • Leverages new Hugo features such as table of content, which will be fun to enable in old posts
  • Automatic dark / light theme

I also took this chance to finally move to CI/CD instead of manually deploying every time. Github actions are not pretty but they do the job.

What I will miss

The coolest thing about hugo-dusk was that it was pure static HTML, no JavaScript. That made the loading of the site super fast and the over-all experience “old-school”. And that was what I was looking for at the time. Moreover, I will miss the shade of orange and the custom play button the old theme had.