Another year, another blog redesign

After a lot of consideration, I've gone ahead and switched out both the backend and the theme of this site yet again. There were a number of ongoing issues, the most notable of which were:

• The monospace font for the Cactus theme was honestly hard to read. Additionally, the mobile layout had poor padding.
• Configuration of the theme involved managing 2 different config files, which quickly became convoluted.
• There was no auto-dark mode for Cactus, and I was not particularly interested in trying to design and configure one.
• The theme was not self-contained, and was loading 5 different minified JS scripts through Cloudflare.
• The hexo backend was excessive for what was essentially a collection of static webpages. It required 10 NPM packages, installing nearly 60Mb of dependencies (the theme was another 12Mb).
• To run hexo, I had to install a NodeJS runtime and a specific version of NPM, which I was doing with NVM (Node Version Manager). Sourcing this in my zshrc was so bloated it was taking seconds to load my shell, which is a known problem.

Ultimately, my requirements are very basic: convert Markdown files into HTML & attach minimal CSS styling (and maybe some very minimal JS for page interactions). I could have put in a lot of time trying to address these items with the existing framework, but my skills in the graphic design department, especially webdev, is currently not my strongest suit. I knew I had gone too far when I started to learn Figma...

Luckily, there was an existing project made specifically for this use case!: Zola

This project hits all the points in my wishlist:

• A single, simple, small binary
• Built-in, easy to use templating engine that can transpile Markdown into HTML
• Can compile Sass into CSS

I also found a theme that looks much better on both mobile and on desktop: Serene

• It has an auto-dark mode theme that looks nice
• Padding is significantly better
• The font choice is much more readable

All in all, this framework and theme is much easier to configure, so I may actually tweak it further (unlike with the previous theme). The only negative impact of this change is that the URL slugs have changed, which will break previous links:

• date baked-in (/2026/03/14/replacin...) --> directly under /posts/ (/posts/replacin...)

Given how minimal (and external dependency-free) this new theme is, I can also revisit hosting a copy of it on a Hidden site through Tor (or even I2P) which, although a fun project, was also annoyingly slow with the heavier framework & additional JS dependencies.