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Wait, this blog looks different now!
Okay, you got me. I changed the theme of the blog. And I know it was not even in the new year goals, but I just couldn’t resist the urge to give it a fresh new look and fix a few things.
I have good reasons for that, let me explain…
The previous theme
For quite a long time the blog was based on the Cactus theme, even when I started this blog using the Hugo framework (old school readers will know!). Then I moved to Astro, and I loved the theme that much that I used the same one based in Astro, named Astro Cactus. It’s a very clean and minimal theme, which was exactly what I wanted when I started the blog.
And it served me well for a long time, it was a great starting point to build the blog around Hugo and then Astro.
However, as the blog evolved, so did my needs…
Too many custom changes
Over time I started adding more and more custom modifications to the theme:
- Layout tweaks
- Styling changes
- Theme adjustments
- Small UX improvements
None of these were particularly big on their own, but together they slowly drifted away from the original theme.
At some point I realized something important: my version of the theme had diverged too much from the upstream project.
This created a practical problem.
The original theme continued evolving, but merging updates became increasingly difficult because my local changes touched many parts of the codebase. Every update required manual adjustments and conflict resolution, I even wrote an article about that!.
Maintaining that setup started to feel heavier than it should for a personal blog, where I want to focus on writing and sharing content, not on theme maintenance.
A bit of fresh air
Another important motivation was simply the need for a bit of fresh air.
Changing the theme is a good excuse to rethink the structure of the blog, simplify things, and remove accumulated complexity.
Instead of continuing to patch the old theme, I decided it was a good moment to migrate to something that:
- Felt more aligned with what I wanted visually
- Required fewer modifications
- Was actively maintained
- Provided a solid base out of the box
And with this, I found AstroPaper, which checked all those boxes and made the decision easy.
Why AstroPaper
Well, it provides many things I like right away: A clean reading experience (the most important thing for a blog!), good typography, built-in features for blog, etc.
And more importantly, it requires far fewer changes for me to adapt it to what I wanted.
So the goal this time is simple: modify less and stay closer to the upstream project, which makes maintenance much easier over time.