When I first set up my site, I used Hugo to build it. Hugo was good - allowing me to focus on just writing the posts in plaintext, and letting the software convert it to HTML.

A little while ago I learned that Hugo is now slopware: software written using “AI”.

I am strongly opposed to “AI” as a technology. I don’t use it; I don’t want to use it; I don’t want to read the text or see the images it generates. For a wide range of reasons that really deserve at least a full post of their own. But not least of which: the ethical implications of “AI” as a technology are just absolutely enormous. And I try to make ethical decisions in the software I use, same as any other area of my life. So I try not to use software written using “AI”.

So I wanted to move off Hugo. I had considered building my site from scratch, using HTML and CSS. But that just sounded like a huge undertaking, more than I really have capacity for right now.

But then I came across Zine. It’s pretty great. In fact more than that, I really like it a lot. The design decisions are so cool; everything is clear and easy to understand, which makes it really easy to quickly put together a site I quite like. It also makes it really easy to see how to change things on the site; for as much as I liked my site built with Hugo, I did not really understand that well how the pieces fit together. This is much clearer.

So this is my new site. It’s probably a work in progress, but I just wanted to get something out quickly while I have some energy capacity. I don’t hate the theme I came up with, actually. Hopefully it works.

I picked Fixel and Maple Mono for the fonts. Fixel is a cool font made in collaboration with a Ukrainian artist; I like it. Maple Mono is a nice monospace font with a rounded style.

The RSS feed has moved, but the existing RSS feed should continue working. Not sure for how long, so if anybody is actually using the RSS feed, maybe update to the new link. The old links should continue working too, I hope.

There’s also now a Now page; a home for shorter posts, maybe I’ll use it to put brief comments about things I’m enjoying without wanting to write a full blog post. There is a separate Now RSS feed.