One giant leap for owlkind

Hello!

It’s been a hot minute since I made my departure from publishing on my previous website “owlspace”. For what it’s worth, I will not link it here since the domain is no longer under my control. Who knows what will happen to the domain in the future. Will someone grab it right when it’s released? Will they try to impersonate me? That’s assuming someone saw a lot of worth in my previous ramblings which — in the unlikely event of it happening — would be as humbling as it would be scary.

Lengthy introduction aside, now comes the main point that I want to get across. Do not assume that anything hosted on the old owlspace domain is my creation from this point forth. If you’re curious as to why I made this move, I archived the entire final state of the website on my GitHub profile. There, you can find the final article I published, which discusses my motivation at length. I left it open-ended stating that I’ll see you — yes, that’s you — again some time soon.

That time is now.

An underwhelming return⌗

The first thing you’ll notice is that this site looks plain in comparison to the custom theme I developed for my previous blog. This is the lovely Terminal theme. It’s slick, simple and minimal, and it’s all I want right now. If you feel like it’s a big step down from what I’ve worked on previously, then you’re probably right. I’ll let you in on a secret.

Building themes is hard.

I’m no frontend developer. I don’t do web design work. Creating the whole theme for my previous blog took about a month, with the added time for maintaining it and adding new features to it.

Hugo — the static site generator (SSG) that I use — is often praised as being one of the easiest and most versatile tools to pick up for people that want to run a simple blog like me. And while it works fine for people who just want to publish content, that’s not necessarily true for people who truly want to make Hugo their own. Archetypes, templates, taxonomies, the Hugo directory lookup order and Go’s interesting¹ HTML templating engine are just a fraction of what’s inevitably an awful lot to learn if you truly want to create a cohesive and unique theme. And even though I’m still proud of what I created, I was never fully satisfied with it.

I want to write about things I enjoy and not get lost in the inner workings of an SSG that I know like 50% of at the very best. I spent so much time working on little details that went unnoticed. Did you know that my old blog’s 404 page had an owl flying through the background if you waited long enough? It’s a detail that I love to death, but it was a misplaced effort. I started to use Hugo hoping to shout my thoughts out in my own little corner of the internet, but I bit off more than I could chew.

All this might sound like I hate Hugo, but I really don’t. I think it’s amazing in what it can do. But I ended up putting too much time and effort into planning how I want the things I publish to look like instead of, well, publishing.

Holding myself accountable⌗

I learned a neat trick to get rid of thoughts that are stuck in my mind. I write them down somewhere, usually with pen and paper, but anywhere else works just as well. It’s good to lift a temporary heavy weight off my shoulders, to manifest the thoughts that bother me at a moment in time, but that’s just the start. It’s coming back to these thoughts, reading them again with a clearer mind, rationalizing them and reevaluating them where I really start to grow as a person. And if I’m ever afraid that I’m about to spend a lot of time on something with little to no positive impact on myself, I’ll come back to this post, read it, consider it and move on.

From now on, Eulenbude is a place for me to talk about tech stuff — about those random thoughts and rabbit holes I dig myself into that I can’t easily share with people I know personally. If you were a fan of owlspace, I’m sorry but that theme won’t be coming back.

Well … not in the same shape and form at least.

Like the keen observer that you are, you have already noticed that this blog is hosted on a subdomain. If you go to eulenbu.de instead, you will be in for a familiar treat. I’m a lot more satisfied with how I’ve set up my web presence than I was a year ago. While space.eulenbu.de is the place for me to write about all kinds of things, eulenbu.de represents who I really am.

With that, I hope you’ll stick around for the nerdy ramblings of a guy who likes owls maybe a bit too much. I sincerely hope you enjoy your stay. I know I will.