The source code for this site is available here.
As stated in the site’s footer, this website is built with:
- Hugo, a static site generator that’s dead simple to use, and
- Papermod, a theme for Hugo that lets you make elegant, super lightweight websites.
My goal in picking these tools was to try to fight, in my own small way, one of the many cancers eating away at the internet, straight out of the Jevons paradox: as bandwidth and server power go up, people make websites optimized like crap, stacked on endless layers of abstraction. Sure, it creates jobs in web dev and lets big companies have fancy 3D product views that animate when you scroll, but the reality is that the internet of the 2020s isn’t really any faster to use than it was in the 2000s: a page still takes several seconds to load and eats up ~5% of your RAM, even though connection speeds have gone from 56 kbps to 300 Mbps (×5000) and RAM from 512 MB to 32 GB (×64). More on that here.
To show off Hugo’s power: this site weighs just 400 KB and builds in 50 ms! If you’re interested for your own site, check out the Hugo docs and their theme page. One of Hugo’s big advantages is you barely have to write any HTML/CSS: everything is Markdown. You can also add some dynamic features, like a contact form or comments section. In the end, you get a minimalist site that’s lightyears ahead of WordPress and the like in terms of load time. For how to add a contact form, check out the site’s source code, and this page.