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by tombert 312 days ago
I currently use Hugo with a fairly lightweight theme for my blog, which I like ok, but my stuff is primarily text and I’ve debated trying to find something even lighter.

The issue is that I do use pictures occasionally in my posts, and these aren’t just flavor, it’ll be graphs and screenshots and stuff. I also do use Javascript purely for the client-side search [1] and going hyper-minimal kind of means a rejection of JavaScript. Search isn’t strictly “necessary” but kind of nice.

And that’s the recurring theme I keep finding; 99% of stuff can easily be converted to a dumb and fast text-only thing, but then there’s that one thing that makes me keep stuff bloated.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-12-search-v2/
1 comments
skydhash 312 days ago
Picture can be ok with an alt text and proper link (not the background-image property) and you can always support ssr for the search page.
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almostbasic 312 days ago
For sure. Pictures certainly have their place on the web. I was speaking more about websites where the entire design is made of images, even when it doesn’t make any sense to do so.
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tombert 312 days ago
Oh I definitely don’t do that; images that I have on there are actual content, not decoration.

The template I have still uses CSS but it’s not a ton of CSS. Probably the most problematic thing I do with it is load a custom TTF font.

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tombert 312 days ago
Sorry, having a bit of trouble with searching…what is SSR?
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skydhash 312 days ago
Server side rendering (templates and sending HTML down the wire) when compared to client side rendering (Receiving json from an API). Mostly used in the JS world as PHP/Django/Rails use SSR by default..
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tombert 312 days ago
But then I have to have a server to serve the data. The entire appeal of something like Hugo is that it is static and can be trivially served with nginx or something.

If I do it client-side then that makes my job a fair bit easier; I don’t need to handle any kind of complicated server logic, I don’t need to mess around with databases, I really don’t need to program at all, and if I am going to manage a blog I fundamentally want it to be about writing. Otherwise all my time goes to fucking around with configurations or figuring out why a database has crashed.

Also I hate Django and Rails and PHP and absolutely will not touch any of them unless someone is paying me. I know there are other options out there though.

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