Hugo

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

We’re back on Hugo

New Orleans without a camera. Hugo and Kirby options.

OMG I never learn. Even when I write stuff down.

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

We’re back on Hugo for baty.net.

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?

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

A lisp function for generating either Page Bundles or normal Markdown files when creating new Hugo posts.

How to fix URLs in RSS feeds when using relative paths in page bundles in Hugo

I needed a change, so I brought the Papermod theme back.

I have been wondering if the benefits of using ox-hugo just so I can write posts using Org-mode format is worth the extra layer of abstraction. I prefer Org-mode to Markdown, but Markdown is fine. In fact, Markdown-mode makes editing Markdown in Emacs quite pleasant. Ox-hugo is a great package, but increasingly seemed like a clever but unnecessary abstraction. One of its best features is that it makes creating new posts super easy. I never liked using the Hugo CLI, so ox-hugo solved that problem.

A new Hugo theme

As much as I, ehem, LoveIt, the theme’s very theme-specific magic felt like trouble waiting to happen. And honestly, I was bored with it, so I went looking for something new.

You’ll notice that I highlight short phrases in many of my daily post entries here. I think this makes it easier to scan things later. The HTML markup for this is just a styled <mark> tag wrapping the text to be highlighted.

UPDATE June 09, 2022: This post was copied and pasted from the original WordPress post. Meta! :) I’m typing this post in the WordPress editor. I don’t enjoy writing here unless I’m adding an image gallery or some other fancy embedded content. It just feels off. “So write in MarsEdit or Ulysses or something instead,” you implore.

Now that I’ve moved my blog back to a static site generated with Hugo, I noticed that I was writing both my Daily notes and my blog posts in side-by-side Emacs buffers. It got me thinking about consolidating my sites even further.

Here we are, running the show as a static blog, using Hugo. But why!? I suppose because I was bored and because it’s fun.

I finally did it. I broke this blog apart and archived 20 years of history.