The Strays

Oops, I did it again! Another new site build strategy

January 31, 2026

I ditched Hugo after almost 2 years. I came across a post detailing a vanilla HTML/CSS approach. It also leveraged uv to run a build script that converted the markdown files to HTML. I modified said script and added a step for my static site search engine I run on my wiki pages. This drastically simplified my build process. Though as of writing, I have yet to rewrite my GH action for deploy, so maybe I shouldn’t speak so soon. See below for the post I used as insipiration for this refactor.

https://www.vijayp.dev/blog/rewrite-plain-html/

Creating a src directory and tidying up

I created a copy of my hugo generated public directory and used it as reference for both the templates I applied to my markdown files and the generated HTML files resulting from my build script. After creating a src directory and an index.html file, I moved my assets and made sure my home page rendered as expected. Then I needed to focus on the other main pages on my site that are in my navigation bar my resume, my portfolio, and my wiki/digital garden (though I actually did a lot of this last).

Refactoring build.py script for my site

I didn’t have to change too much. I write a traditional blog, poetry page, and a wiki / digital garden. The blog and poems use the same page layout and almost the same CSS. So I made the build script Vijay provided reusable for both sites’ content. I created a separate build function for the wiki pages, since they’re quite different. Overall, still a very short script, topping out around 159 lines or so.

I didn’t have Hugo to make partials anymore, so I decided to use some JS to write web components for my header and footer. This does mean that my head.html is a bit redundant on each page, but since I’m using html templates and Pandoc to generate so many when I run make build, it works fine.

I tried fiddling with lunar.js and got pretty far along. I generated the index, just needed to build the actual search box and then I guess the build steps on deploy. But I realized I could just use PageFind like I had been with Hugo, so I went with that. PageFind has worked fine for me and it’s more batteries included. I could probably do some work on the search results. I think it is a little too fuzzy right now, but that’s a problem for another day.

Now I just gotta deploy the dang thing! I’ll come back here if I have any problems I guess. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE post deploy

This literally built successfully on the first run! Hooray!