Switched to SvelteKit

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023

Why switch when the old thing worked just fine?

I mean, that’s definitely a good question.

Ever since I have been at least a little serious about my personal website and blog, I’ve used a combination of Hugo and the hugo-PaperMod theme to get the job done. And the job done they got. But somehow, it didn’t feel good enough.

You see, even though no one probably reads this blog, I still take pride in this website. And every time I browsed the internet and visited a different blog that looked exactly like mine (based on hugo-PaperMod), I would loose a bit of that pride.

Every time I wanted to slightly adjust the footer or tried adding other new cool things to the blog, I either couldn’t due to it’s fully-static nature, or the result didn’t look visually satisfactory.

Eventually, I got frustrated enough to say enough and went on to rebuild my website from scratch.

Why SvelteKit?

Three reasons:

1. It’s fast
   • That doesn’t include just page reloads during development that feel at least 5x faster than NextJS, but everything else as well.
2. It’s simple
   • Everything looks and feels like the basic building blocks of the web - HTML is HTML, CSS is CSS and Javascript feels like Javascript.
3. It’s sexy
   • A small but good example is that I can define CSS per component instead of having to do everything globally. This basically eliminates the need for something like Tailwind CSS and made me appreciate CSS over Tailwind (which I initially thought was just way better).
   • I am no frontend genius, but I wanted some nice transition animations on my site. It took me less than 30 minutes to implement this from the moment I started looking at the documentation. Here is the full implementation.

What’s next?

Right now, the new site has all the functionality my old site had, and that’s great.

I’ve checked off all checkboxes that I had created for this migration in Joplin except for writing and posting this blog post, which I am doing right now.

I have some additional notes below the ones I’ve just shared with plans of what I want to potentially add to my site over time.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list, but here are a couple ideas:

• Create a /changelog page that would simply reflect things changed/added to the blog
  • Not sure if this holds much value as the entire git commit history is public.
• Add a little “Reactions” section.
  • The idea here is to have a little self-made comment section, together with some simple, emoji-based reactions together with a reaction counter per-post. I got this idea from Vadmin Kravcenko’s site.
• Display a fancy, automatically-fetched list of my projects from Codeberg and Github on a /projects page.
• Create a /recent-activities page that would pull my Garmin activities data and display them in the form of some nice graphs, inclusive of stats and other niceties.
• Add a contact form to the contact page.

Future future?

Will I ever move on from SvelteKit? I mean, most likely?

This is software that we are talking about here; what do I know what will the standard demands on a personal website look like in the age of Apple Vision Pros and the Metaverses?

For now, however, I am really happy with it and I intend to build anything-web with Svelte and SvelteKit going forward.