It’s been about 20 years since I had a blog, and a lot has changed. Before there were Facebook, Twitter, Substack, or any of the other walled-off platforms, there was Movable Type. It wasn’t the first blogging platform, but it was a pivotal tool in the history of personal publishing.

To honor that legacy, I created a new theme for the Hugo static site generator that pays homage to the simple layout of the themes that shipped with Movable Type in early 2005, albeit with some modern touches such as mobile support and dark mode.

In keeping with that simplicity, the back end is just a directory of markdown files stored on GitHub with a build pipeline that pushes statically generated HTML files to AWS S3 behind CloudFront. I also haven’t added cookies or trackers. In fact, there are no JavaScript or external dependencies other than Hugo. I’d say no server, but the cloud is, after all, just somebody else’s server.

Loading the site makes two requests totaling less than 10 KB, and costs less than $1/month to run.

If you want to use Hugo for your own blog, you can get it here: Hugo open-source static site generator

If you want to use this theme, it’s available here: Emtee theme