Creating This Website

It’s been almost 7 years since I’ve created this website, and it’s time for an upgrade.

This is what it used to look like: http://2018.www.marcuschiu.com/

It has nice bouncy animations, but I want more:

• I need a way to write about my journey for each project. Which I could with the old website, however it’s just not builtin to the website. It’s just pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• I also need a way to embed different domains of my life in a single place. Such as art, music, and the occasional rambles.

For the past 6 months, I’ve used WordPress to store my rambles (i.e. thoughts.marcuschiu.com). I could use it as my main site and add a tab for tinkerings and what not - buuuuuuuut NO. I want something else :)

Oh by the way - I want this site to be a static too, so I could serve it with my current Nginx server. So no spinning up a new server because I’m poor.

ALSO IT MUST BE OPEN-SOURCE!!!!

So I’ve looked online. And oh boy. There’s so many..

• Ghost
• Gatsby
• Astro
• Hugo
• Eleventy
• Jekyll
• etc

Ehhhh I’m lazy so I’ve ended choosing the one with the most github stars, which happens to be Hugo.

I’ve installed Hugo.

Tried to understand this new thingymajig, tinkered the project structure, browsed some themes, was briefly excited that it uses Markdown, began migrating some rambles from WordPress into Hugo, realized some features were missing, coded out some of the features (e.g. image carousel), learned the weird language of shortcodes, failed at making a floating table of contents for each page, added Disqus, and then after 2 days of constant coding - wahlahhhh!