stuff I did to my blog

January 10, 2026 · 4 min read

Thought I’d make a post on the changes I did to my blog before I forget. I just did most of it because I was bored and I was playing with some coding agents. I’m not a developer or anything by profession, I just like to tinker with things and see what I can do.

Firstly, I wanted something very simple and minimalist. I needed the workflow to be easy as well to write more often - especially on mobile. Searched for a Hugo blog theme that fits this category. I usually get a lot of results but something or the other puts me off. There are themes that frustrated me even after using it for a while before. I came across Shibui in the recently updated search result. It was very simple, simpler than what you see in my blog. Decided to give it a try and heavily modified to my liking with the help from Amp and Sonnet 4.5. Let me recollect what I did,

change log

  • hugo + Shibui theme hosted files on GitHub
  • Cloudflare pages + workers for deployment
  • Every time I commit, GitHub sends a web hook trigger to cloudflare. worker & pages (builds the site in a separate container) will automatically build and deploy changes to jerwin.dev
  • created wrangler.toml to get this working, last time for a Jekyll blog I don’t remember doing all this
  • Default cloudflare worker name would be something else, cloudflare suggested to update to my repo name
  • Fixed how tags are displayed & the underlying page showcasing multiple posts with common tag
  • Generated an rss link & displayed in homepage. I guess you don’t need to do anything additional if you use hugo (root/index.xml)
  • Added a search box with some custom css. //Pleasantly surprised on how good this ended up working
  • Most of my posts contained imgur embeds, moved them inside repo
  • Added + later removed weather, time, now (focus) page and a random post generator link
  • Updated links to be opened in new window and in a safer way(render-link.html)
  • Saw Sathya used Gallery grid for his images and moved everything to his style and later changed to something similar
  • Changed post names + post title to be uniform across similar posts //like weekly notes
  • Moved nav bar from bottom to sidebar //created a sidebar for mobile view
  • Displayed nav at top during mobile view + hide sidebar < resolution // since nav was completely invisible when accessed via mobile browser, unless you zoomed out like 50%
  • Added word count in posts
  • Added a reading completion progress bar when you scroll through the post // line below your bookmarks bar; hard to notice at first glance
  • Added a stats page which shows word heat map, longest post, some gamification rewards for writing and a bar to check words written by month/year
  • Added an archive by year section in nav
  • Added same word heat map in /stats in the homepage as well
  • Some optimization hack thanks to amp code
  • Image compression script + github actions for auto compression (mobile pics were all >1mb)
  • Added a week streak counter to the footer and fixed logic
  • Added the total number of words written in posts at the footer
  • Added stats page to footer
  • Added recent posts in homepage
  • Added “x words written in the last year” to mimic GitHub contribution map
  • Fixed heat map logic to consider a week from Monday to Sunday (ex: Jan 5-11)
  • Listed posts by descending numbers + pagination
  • Moved the file structure from flat .md files (content/posts) + static/images/ to page bundles, where each post is a folder containing index.md + images together. This was done for easier mobile workflow

Before:

content/posts/2024-Week-12.md
static/images/2024-12/1.jpg

After:

content/posts/
├── 2024-week-12/
│   └── index.md
├── 2024-week-33/
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── 1.jpeg
│   └── 2.jpeg
  • Replaced Gallery short code with markdown images but added the auto light box js (makes images clickable) + image grid css (to mimic old gallery grouping) preview & hover aesthetics that comes with the gallery grid
{ { < gallery "/images/2032-12" "" "1.jpg" >} } to ![](1.jpg) + with some grid replication elements under the hood to mimic gallery
  • Some image grid box size fix and grouping fix
  • iOS shortcut for autogenerating post folder which has index.md + index.md has preconfigured hugo template generated (mobile)

Mobile workflow:

The only thing I paid for here is for the domain purchase and for the working copy (iOS) Pro unlock within the app. I used to do this with iSH + Obsidian but looks like things have changed in the iOS ecosystem which has made it more difficult to use this combo.

iOS Shortcut → Create folder + template
     ↓
Pick photos → Auto-renamed (1.jpeg, 2.jpeg)
     ↓
Write in Obsidian with ![](1.jpeg)
     ↓
Push via Working Copy (Paid)
     ↓
GitHub Action compresses images
     ↓
Cloudflare pages receives trigger
     ↓
Hugo builds the site
     ↓
Cloudflare deploys (/public) change

References & help:

../