Website refresh: new theme, new hosting, same blog
If you’ve visited the site before, you might notice things look a bit different. I did some spring cleaning. New theme, new hosting, and a couple of smaller tweaks under the hood.
Here’s what changed and why.
New theme
The previous theme was fine, but it was starting to feel stale. Instead of spending hours browsing Hugo themes and then customizing one, I’ve used Claude Code to generate a custom one from scratch. I described what I wanted — clean, minimal, readable — and iterated from there. Honestly, faster than I expected and the result is exactly what I had in mind. Also, very important for me was to keep my webpage under 512kb to still qualify for 512kb club.
Moving from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages
Back in 2023 I wrote about how I automated blog publishing with GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. That setup worked great for a long time. But I was already using Cloudflare for DNS, so moving the hosting there too made sense. Fewer moving parts, plus that I always wanted to test more services from Cloudflare.
The migration itself was straightforward. Point the build to Cloudflare Pages, adjust DNS, done.
The more interesting part: build times got noticeably faster.
| Min | Max | Avg | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | 36s | 55s | ~44s |
| Cloudflare Pages | 21s | 34s | ~27s |
That’s roughly a 40% improvement on average. Not a huge deal for a personal blog, but it’s a nice bonus on top of the simplification.
Both options are free for a site at this scale, so no change there.
What’s next
Personal websites with a custom domain used to be a “tech people only” thing. With the tools available today like free hosting, AI-assisted design, automated deployments, that’s no longer true. Anyone can have this setup. The barrier is basically gone.