Some Background

It’s a new month, and so I have some new goals. One of them is to try and use my website more- and by that I mean blog more. I like the idea of documenting bits of every day so that in the future I can come back, look at these posts and piece together how much I’ve changed and whatnot.

So to kick off trying to blog more, I decided to try and fix some of the pain points I was having with my site now. I’ve been doing a bit of research into static site generators, and decided that maybe using Hugo would be fun. A long-ish term goal of mine is to dive into Golang a bit, so maybe this can be a good way to dip my toes in the water.

I’m planning on doing a more thorough write up of my thoughts on this in the future, so let’s move on to what I did today.

Setting up Hugo

So on my Mac, it’s quick and easy to install Hugo. I just ran brew install hugo.

For my theme, I looked through all of my options on Hugo Themes and decided to go with the Hyde theme. I’m a big fan of the two colomn design, where one column serves as a header. I’d like to write my own theme one day because I am also a huge fan of card-based elements and I haven’t seen a theme that does it yet.

After setting up the theme, there was nothing left to do but to layout how I wanted the sitemap to work. I quickly figured out how to add links to the sidebar using the method the theme writer(s) intended. The hardest part of what I did today was to get the individual pages to be structured the way I wanted them to be. Using Jekyll, it was easy because you put it in the front matter or just straight up work an index.html file. I dug through the Hugo Docs and found that Hugo really leans on the structure of the directory your site is sitting in. So I made all of the appropriate directories in the /layouts folder, peeked at the Hyde theme folder to get the correct file names, and made the appropriate list.html and single.html files.

Moving forward

Next steps are probably to get the CSS set up how I want it. Then I’ll work on porting over old blog posts and fleshing out the About Me section. I haven’t tried to set this up on Github yet, but I’ve seen instructions for it, and it’s not too scary looking.