# Blog setup

Shit, this website way took too long and unequivocally frustrating to set-up. But as with any experience, I think the process has taught me a lot about what I expect of myself when writing down my thoughts and how to present them.

As of this post's inception, I plan to write chronologically, because I think it best explains how I arrived at the current state of the blog. I may change this, depending on how concisely I can write about my experiences.

# Hugo

Among other reasons to start writing, I looked up to my friend Justin's blog as reference point. Justin had originally used Jekyll to help scaffold his website, then switched over to Hugo. He seemed pretty happy with it, noting a speedup in site building. So I too looked into Hugo. However, I have dignity and didn't want my website to appear an exact copy, so I set off looking for a theme I liked.

Amusingly, that logic extended into theming that well. There were themes that stood out to me, but I remained mostly unhappy that I wasn't able to get the theme to show exactly as I liked. I didn't know CSS very well - enough to poke around and figure out gets toggled, but not enough to feel confident about refactoring entire layouts. So I was hung up on the details, and never really focused on the content itself.

Another important bit is that I wanted the flexibility to include JS in my posts. Around the time I started this endeavor I was learning about VueJS. I wanted to take advantage of a modern JS ecosystem such as Vue, with its component-focused design, in combination with Webpack, single-file components. So naturally I hated the idea of including dirty <script> tags, importing Vue libaries from CDNs, and the like in my pretty Markdown file.

In retrospect I think Hugo still would have suited most of my blogging needs.