Hugo

Using an SSG for building a blog isn’t complicated enough, so I added a layer of Org mode atop mine.

In How about some blogging stability for 2026? I wrote that I resolved to not change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. This would be an easy goal for most people. For me, though, it’s a bit of a challenge. I was bored this morning, which is never a good sign. For something to do, instead of changing platforms, I decided to change Hugo themes instead. Totally within the boundaries, right? ...

Sooo, I thought I wanted a new theme but that didn’t work out, so I changed my mind and decided to go back to my old PaperMod theme. Trouble is, that theme was made for Hugo1, so I also had to move things back to Hugo. Had to! 😀 I like PaperMod well enough. It’s not the full-post-on-home-page I was looking for, but its excerpt handling is good enough for who it’s for. ...

I’m fishing for a new theme. I’m willing to change SSGs to get one I like.

I wanted a more generic version of my emacs lisp function for creating new posts. Claude helped me write it.

Creating a new blog post for Hugo couldn’t be simpler. One simply creates a new Markdown file in the correct folder, making sure it contains the proper YAML front matter, and…OK, it’s not that simple. Normally I use a small lisp function in Emacs for creating posts, but that doesn’t help me on days that I don’t feel like using Emacs1. Another option would be to use the built-in hugo commands, but for some reason I never think of that. Probably because it requires that I cd to the right place and tell it what to name the file. ...

Hugo is actively developed and still gets a lot of attention. This is fine. What’s not fine is that it seems like every third update introduces breaking changes. I updated to 0.146.5 and my site failed to build. This was a theme thing, and thankfully the theme maintainer was on it. Still annoying. I like using Hugo and I like my theme and I like having a static website. What I don’t like is not knowing if things are going to still work next week. ...

You’ll notice that baty.net is back to using Hugo1. I really like Kirby, but every time I use a platform that’s not fully static, I get twitchy, and I got twitchy. I’m using a new theme, Anubis2, which I find to be easy to read and just the right amount of boring. It doesn’t have all the features of the PaperMod theme I was using, but it’s simpler, and simpler is what I was after. ...

Pagefind makes me happy. It is a static search library that is so easy to configure and use that I can hardly believe it. Here’s a quick summary of how I implemented Pagefind search here in the Anubis2 Hugo theme1. ...

I came this close to moving my blog at baty.net back to Hugo. Even worse, I considered archiving all the content and starting fresh. I mean, completely fresh. No more dragging around years of images and posts that have been converted to and from several Markdown formats for various blogging engines. I still may, but I’ve given myself a reprieve this morning. Sort of. ...

It’s been nearly a month using Ghost, so it was time to switch back to Hugo.

I sure wish Hugo would stop deprecating things. This time it’s site.Social. My theme uses that in a couple of files, and the theme’s author is busy and doesn’t always have time to fix things right away. They now want site.Params.Social so I’ve temporarily fixed the problem myself by editing two files. In twitter_cards.html: {{ with site.Social.twitter -}} # becomes {{ with .Site.Params.Social.twitter -}} And in opengraph.html: {{- with site.Social.facebook_admin }} # becomes {{- with .Site.Params.Social.facebook_admin }} At least now the error is gone and the site builds. I’ll need to keep an eye on the PaperMod repo for a real fix. ...

We’re back on Hugo

New Orleans without a camera. Hugo and Kirby options.

OMG I never learn. Even when I write stuff down. Every time I switch back to Hugo, I complain about the fact that when using relative image links in Hugo’s Page Bundles, they don’t work in the RSS feed. Then I spend time digging around old forum posts or whatever trying to fix the problem. Except I already have fixed the problem. At least twice. Maybe just check your own notes, Jack. ...

I was bored and feeling some nostalgia about Hugo so here we are again.

We’re back on Hugo for baty.net. For the past few months, I’ve been learning how to create a blog using Kirby CMS and it’s been a blast. Kirby is pleasant, easy, and fun to use. I’m glad I did it. I won’t bother you with a 2,000-word rationalization piece about switching. I just felt like using Hugo again, so here we are. I missed my nice Emacs-based publishing workflow. I missed “normal” YAML front matter. I missed having a completely static website. Who knows where we’ll be in a month, but today we’re using Hugo. I went back to the PaperMod theme. I don’t love how boring it is, but it’s clean, feature-rich, frequently updated, and easy to customize. ...

After yesterday’s Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I’ve been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don’t really have an answer to. I guess it’s my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But “just so” changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It’s fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still.

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo? I have.

It’s possible that no one will ever see this post. I’m writing a Hugo-formatted markdown file in Emacs. This means it will be published to a defunct copy of my blog1 Unless of course I decide to bring it back as baty.net. If that happens, then 👋! ↩︎