Moving Blog to Hugo

Moving to Hugo

The site previously used metalsmith.js in a clunky DIY way. Metalsmith allows a lot of markdown extensions quite easily. With hugo you have markdown render hooks that can provide some of the functionality.

Documentation

It’s weirdly long (verbose) and yet shallow at the same time. The API is documented in a non-standard way. I spent way, way more time than I should have just trying to piece together bits of information spread out on various pages. For that reason, I don’t recommend starting with Hugo. And it’s a reminder to myself to always check the quality of the documentation (or to see if the code is self documenting) before using some library.

Misc

Apart from the documentation the experience is pretty good. There are a lot of good functions (although good luck with the docs) and the templating language isn’t too bad. No go specific knowledge is required.

QoL Fixes

I also made many customisations, improvements and corrections (view on small screens fixed) to an existing hugo template: https://github.com/bn-l/hugo-paper

A nice wrapper around the hugo command that creates a new post from a yaml template:

new-hugo() {

  FILENAME=$(echo "content/posts/$*" | sed 's/ /-/g').md
  URL=$(echo "http://localhost:1313/posts/$*" | sed 's/ /-/g')

  hugo new "$FILENAME" && "/c/Users/me/AppData/Local/Programs/Typora/Typora.exe" "$FILENAME" && sleep 1 && hugo server --navigateToChanged -D --disableFastRender --templateMetrics --templateMetricsHints &
  python -m webbrowser "$URL"
}

Running new-hugo some cool new post will create a new post with the title Some Cool New Post, start the hugo dev server (with the -D flag to show drafts), open the url in a browser, and then open the file in my markdown editor (Typora).