I built the first version of this site a year ago - but couldn’t really find a theme that I liked and that works well for what I intend to be something of a stream-of-consciousness website.

Like many people I spend a lot of time reading news and social media.

I end up with lots of half formed thoughts that I don’t know quite what to do with - I’m hoping that the discipline of writing them down will help bring me calm.

If anything I write is of help to others - that is a bonus.

As a web developer any website is also an opportunity to learn.

What I wanted was a simple, clean look, with an emphasis on unstructured content.

I like to tag each post so that after time as I write on the same topics it becomes easier to find related posts.

As I don’t know in advance what these topics will be I don’t want to setup a hierarchy,

I don’t find the Hugo Themes very useful as there is no way to sort themes by quality or by date and you can only view by one tag - so I can look at blog themes or Bootstrap themes but not Blog themes which are also Bootstrap themes.

So I picked one that looked kinda OK, changed a bit here and there - ended up completely re-writing it and switched CSS framework to use Bootstrap

While Bootstrap has way more features than I need for this site (in particular Javascript related ones) I have been using it for other projects lately and it suits me better at the moment to stick to this one tool.

In the end I think it has been more work to undo my starting theme and I;d have been much better off starting from scratch with

1

hugo new theme mytheme

There is a good post on that subject here https://willschenk.com/articles/2018/building-a-hugo-site/

I wish I’d read that to start with.

My new theme will do for now - this is a personal not a professional site and while I don’t consider it fully polished it is good enough (Steve Jobs was wrong - but that’s a post for another day).

Time to ship it - and start using it.