I’ve been using Hugo for this blog for a few years now. It works well for me and I’ve not done much customization to the theme at all.

Earlier this year, I took at look Mermaid to produce some charts for inclusion in the blog. The way that worked was by using a link to content hosted on another site. That was really easy to do, but I’d rather have the content inside my blog content.

Enter the use of a shortcode to render the mermaid markdown right in my blog. I found a really nice post that described exactly how to do it. I’ve added the shortcode to my site and can now render fun charts like this one:

pie title Workouts this week "Walking" : 7 "Yoga" : 5 "Rowing" : 3 "Cycling" : 3 "Running" : 1

The hardest part was creating a fork of the theme that I’m using and then updating my .gitmodules to point to my fork. I had to lookup how to do that but it all worked pretty well.