Scratchpad
  • Writings

Hello Hugo

Date [ ] Categories [ General ] Tags [ Hugo Golang ]

Say hello to my new site!

You may have guessed it - I was not really happy with Ghost so I decided to use Hugo for this site now.

The migration of the content was really a breeze. I wrote the entries in Markdown inside Ghost, so after all it was just copy pasting.

It’s great that Hugo supports aliases for URLs, so all the links should stay intact. You’ll get redirected to the new location if you hit an old one. Also I’m trying to redirect the URL of the RSS feed - Let’s see how this will work out..

As a cherry on top, I wrote myself some script to automatically build the Website when I’m pushing new content into the git repository. This is very comfortable - editing content locally inside a good and well adjusted text editor, publish it with git, and let the server do the rest.

But the best part: I can finally abandon Node.js from my server. Node itself is not a problem, but keeping all packages for Ghost up to date is really time consuming and all the worries about it are driving me mad…

However I struggled very much to select a decent theme:

  • It should look good
    • Must work on small and big screen sizes
    • Text should be readable (high contrast)
  • It must have a decent quality in code
    • Doesn’t use string concatenation to construct URLs
      • this will break if you have some special requirement - been there, done that)
    • (HTML) Output should be readable and straight forward
      • As little JavaScript as possible, please
      • Doesn’t use a full blown framework for just one tiny feature
  • Must be focused on privacy
    • No external requests for CSS, Fonts, JS, whatever
  • RSS Feed must have full content
    • I hate that when others do it

This is really much to ask, so the selection boils down to (almost ?) zero. So I did what seemed logical - I forked some existing theme which I liked and implemented/changed what was missing.

It would have been faster to write a theme from scratch I guess… In a future blog post I’ll tell you more about the adventures I encountered while building a theme for Hugo.

Stay tuned!