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54 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Hugo"
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date: "2022-08-18T14:53:00+02:00"
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author: "$HUMANOID"
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tags: ["hugo", "technology"]
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description: "A little ramble about Hugo"
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---
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# Reflection
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I've tried to take a look at [Hugo](https://gohugo.io) for a few times before properly diving into it.
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The first time was back when I first decided to look into making a website not-completely by hand.
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I had hacked a few previous iterations of this site together and was happy with the design.
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The next step was to write some blobs of text for people to read besides the random antics that can be found in the side bar.
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A few problems arose here.
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For one, writing directly in HTML is a pain.
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So I decided to write in markdown and convert that to HTML using [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org).
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From there, I still had to index every page completely by hand.
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The prospect of this annoyed me quite a bit, so I decided to take a cursory glance at Hugo.
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The quick start guide showed how to take a pre-existing theme, a bunch of markdown files and turn that into website.
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Never having been one to use other people's work as-is, I quickly gave up when I saw the structure of the themes and couldn't be bothered to give it a proper shot.
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This also gave me the impression of it being a Wordpress-esque environment that works great as long as you stick within the standards.
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A bit later I found out that Pandoc supports templates.
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So I tried my hand at hacking a site generator together based on a Makefile and Pandoc.
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This worked... somewhat.
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But I deemed it more trouble than it was worth and never got very far with it.
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A few weeks ago, I came across someone mentioning Hugo again and how it was really great.
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I decided to give it another shot.
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This time really diving into the structure of the themes and it clicked.
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A thing that probably helped this time around was that it very quickly became clear to me that the features I had been half arsedly implementing in my Makefile were standard features for Hugo.
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Another thing that undoubtedly helped being that the philosophy and syntax of Pandoc's more advanced features are quite similar to Hugo's.
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## Disservice to Hugo
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One big thing I bump into with Hugo is the fact that most Hugo websites I come across take one template and _maybe_ change the colorscheme.
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I feel this is a great disservice to the potential that Hugo has to offer in terms of flexibility.
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Yes, you _can_ have it act similar to Wordpress, but you don't _have to_.
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I was scared off because I assumed would have to use some existing template or get my CSS to work within a Hugo context.
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The process of which, I assumed, would be mostly having beat Hugo into submission before it would display the things I wanted in the way I wanted.
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The beauty of Hugo and ultimately the reason this is now a Hugo site, is it's flexibility.
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You wouldn't be able to tell this is a Hugo site if you don't dig through the metadata fields in the `<head>` tag.
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And I guess that is also kind of the problem with it.
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Most people visibly using Hugo take some standard template proudly proclaiming that the page we're presently looking at is generated using it.
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And the people who want to use Hugo but don't care for the pre-existing themes, don't care to proudly shout to the world that their site is made with it.
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This is why I got the impressions of Hugo that I did.
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In that sense, I'm part of the problem in not showing that Hugo can do pretty much anything you can think of in the realm of static, somewhat blog oriented websites.
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