Why Hugo?

Honestly I kind of chose it on a whim. I was researching various static site generators, when I came across Hugo. Not only did it seem to fit my use case perfectly, it was written in my favourite language! After using Hugo for a while, I feel like I made the right choice. I have fought with it at times, but usually the answer was easy to find in the official documentation.

Notes

This blog uses a theme called Poison, I found the configuration for this to be mostly straightforward. I am using Utterances for the comments, I had to make a few minor changes to the theme for the comments to work properly. While I was making changes to the theme, I also added configuration for a disclaimer page, which I felt was important.

Something that I really appreciate about Hugo is the out-of-the-box RSS feed support. I want to share my content with others, and I think it’s important that they are able to view it comfortably, so having an RSS feed for my blog was a must from the start.

Challenges

  • For a while I was struggling to get the main image to resolve properly on all pages, but this seemed to fix itself eventually
  • It took me longer than I would like to admit, to figure out that I had to change the base URL in hugo.toml in order to make all the pages resolve properly.
  • Setting up Utterences took me a little while, I had to dig through some files in the theme, since it did not support Utterances out of the box.
    • It was worth it because I want to provide this site for free, and I also do not want to embed trackers or ads in order to offset the cost of a different commenting solution. I also like the idea of having all the comments stored in the repository.

Until next time!

-Korben