Hugo

I wanted to change my site theme from Ghostwriter to Harbor. I like the look better and Harbor has a nice search feature which seems useful. I had hoped that this would be simple, but Hugo Themes don’t follow a strict standard for where things go and how they are configured. Instead, I had to move my post files around (restructuring my naming convention at the same time) and redo the config.

I like the publication workflow in Netlify with Hugo. It’s pretty easy: everything in your master branch is published when it’s committed. That’s quite nice. But if you want to create entries that get published in the future, it’s not as convienient. A quick search on the Netlify Community had a few options listed. But none seemed easier than this one which proposes using a scheduled Github Action to push the build to a Netlify build hook.

Something that wasn’t entirely clear to me as I set up this blog with Hugo was the best way to organize blog entries so that they can have images or other content in them. Page Bundles are a good way to do this. They allow you to put content together in a folder to create a single page. I decided to follow a date-based numbering scheme for my posts (I’m not sure if this is the best, but that way, I don’t have to think about it much, I just pick the next number) so to create a new page bundle, the command looked like:

Hugo is a good tool for building simple websites. It’s easy to get started with and has a simple workflow that gets out of the way for ongoing updates. Essentially, I followed the steps outlined in the Quick Start and applied the ghostwriter theme. I decided to host the site on Netlify because it had a simple Github based publication process and was very easy to set up. After I generated the site following the Quick Start, I created a new private Github repo and pushed the site up there.