Redoing my website from scratch

I met a cool person Max with a cool website, and it made me realize that my website could use some TLC. In particular, I was no longer happy with the following aspects of it, in approximately descending order of importance:

1. The source code was not available. For somebody that claims to care about open-source and free projects, this felt hypocritical.
2. I didn’t understand how Hugo worked¹, so modifying the theme I used (from Olivier Roques) often took more effort than I would have liked and felt like I was putting duct tape over the holes of a leaking barrel of water.
3. Max wrote 2 posts that piqued my interest. One about self-hosting fonts and another about rendering $\LaTeX$ server-side. I wanted to implement both elements into my website.

While the first and final of these reasons could reasonably be achieved by open-sourcing my site and working from what was already there, I had the following objections:

1. I didn’t want to release my previous git history to the world.²
2. I just wanted to make the theme from scratch.

So I got started on the process. Eventually, I’ll migrate at least some of the old posts to this website.

Here are some goals I have for this new project:

• Open-source from day 1.
• Understand the various license options, and pick one.³
• Understand every single piece of my website’s codebase, without exception.
• Clean commit history (always a work in progress).
• Locally hosted fonts.
• No client-side JavaScript, cookies, anything. Just plain, static html.
• Multilingual support.

In writing the code for this website, I did reference the css and design choices of a few sites I enjoy. In particular Max’s website, Olivier’s original theme, and Elijan Mastnak’s website. I am grateful for these people and the many others from whom I drew inspiration.