Today I finally got around to downgrading my blog. I call it a “downgrade” because it’s less modern looking, but I consider it a refresh stylistically as I prefer the “old internet” HTML 1.0 look. The look is inspired by GNU manuals (actually, the GCC docs have slightly more styling).
There was nothing really wrong with Jekyll, the previous static blog site generator. The only very minor gripes are that it required me installing Ruby, and the site layout files including SCSS took a little while to figure out. Now, I write my posts in pure HTML. There is no Ruby bundle exec and not even a Makefile. Most of it is text anyway with <p> tags. Working hands-on with raw HTML is a good learning experience in my view. (I always have a tab to MDN open.)
Previously the blog was based on a theme called jekyll-simple by wild-flame. I already stripped out all the javascript from that theme, but it still was too professional-looking. The only use cases for JS I can imagine are MathJax or using a plugin for commenting, which no one will do anyway. MathJax can be rendered statically, like it is on old academic sites. I doubt I will be posting math on a blog, though, as most of that is reserved for Math Stack Exchange (MSE).