Website Redesigned

I started Built to Last Reviews about a year ago using Wordpress. Pre-built themes never suit me (I’m picky), so I modified one that looked okay, to one that looked great. It had some flaws, as expected when building on top of someone else’s code, but it worked. But it was still Wordpress.

Wordpress has the disadvantage of being so user friendly. Everything is possible, and for this there are thousands of plugins available. For most users this just cannot be better. But for me, as someone who prefers to develop his own, it provides a severe hurdle. Try Googling a solution to a Wordpress coding problem; all you will find are posts suggesting one plugin after the other. Next to that, Wordpress is slow and is a running security loophole.

I stumbled onto Jekyll, a static site generator. Perfect, but the compilation was so slow. Ok, I develop on my phone, but multiple minutes just to apply a simple template to some markdown files is just not acceptable.

Then I found Hugo! Hugo does everything Jekyll does, but lightning fast! Compile times are under a second (on a phone running Debian inside Termux!), the output are static websites, which are faaast compared to php based sites, and best of all: when I Google for some support I actually find coding advice! You could say that here at Hugo everyone has to invent the wheel for himself, but to me that’s a feature!

So here we are, BTL 2.0. New design and much faster in both the browsing and the authoring. It is of course still a work in progress (it will forever be as tinkering with Hugo is loads of fun), so don’t mind the funky bits here and there. For the rest, enjoy.

One last thing: gohugo.io !