Intro
I started off creating a minimalistic website with vanilla CSS and HTML. My goal was to build a simple lightweight and fast personal website and it worked out pretty well. Until I realized having a blog with the website should be pretty good.
So off I went and created a blog page template with various styles, again all using vanilla CSS.
Realization
Next I wanted to optimize my static personal website so that it would pop-up on the first search result while searching pr0PM or Prateek Mishra + some related info.
While learning bits and pieces of SEO I came across sitemaps, meta tags and a whole bunch of other stuff.
This increasing complexity was going out of hand and having to manage all of this didn’t make sense for something that was supposed to be simply stupid.
Static Site Generators
From expecting a custom minimalist design to getting overwhelmed with lots of things to manage I gave up and went in search of a static site generator and a perfect theme with all features I wanted. While looking around I tried multiple ones but during that time I was able to nitpick something or the other and reject them all.
PaperMod
I really liked the minimalist design philosophy here. Some of the things that sealed the deal were built in dark theme toggle, helpful features for blog posts like draft, tagging, search, table of contents, SEO, editable links, custom menu and the notable feature to toggle the style of the site between blog, portfolio. Plus Hugo is a lightweight single binary with auto page reload. I needed nothing more and hence quenched my thirst for finally utilizing the domain I had bought for my personal website :D