I don’t remember exactly what I did when I decided I wanted to write about what I was learning, but I found Hugo pretty quickly.

The idea was to have a public place for my notes to function as a sort of second brain for myself, which I could look up in when needed. Hugo seemed to fit the bill perfectly, being blazing fast with lots of themes to select from. I had the vision I could just write down my notes, press a button to publish, and I would have a beautiful page looking exactly how I wanted.

Enter reality.

While there are a lot of themes readily available, even so in just the blog category, they did not really look like I had envisioned my blog to be. No worries, right? Hugo is touted as being flexible and I imagined I would quickly be able to customize it to look exactly like I wanted.

Enter reality, again.

While true that Hugo is flexible, just look at all the different themes to see what can be achived, this turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole. Looking at the documentation, I was quickly to exposed to things I had never heard about before, like “front-matter” and “taxonomy”. In due time I will probably look into learning more about this, maybe I need to write my own theme to be satisfied, but it is not my priority now. I ended up spending more time than I wanted on this, but with some small changes here and there I was able to make it look good enough for now. This is no critique of the theme I am using, by no means, it just wasn’t exactly what I had hoped.

For starters there are certain things regarding dates I want to change. The “published” date is actually the time and date the file was created. Now I can change this manually, but I had hoped it would automatically set the time and date when I pressed the button to publish the post.

“Updated” is last time the file was written to, so a completely new post will have both of those times shown, even though I don’t really consider the post to be updated. I want updated to be if I go in and edit the post after it has been published, which I guess I have to set manually.

I also want a small area for a sort of change log explaining why I updated the post and what was changed. Then I might also want to change the styling a little more than I have already done, but like I said, this is not where I want to spend my time right now.

I guess someone might want to mention Wordpress right now, but I don’t know anything about it. As I have my own server and can look at the access logs, I see constant scanning from bots trying to access Wordpress pages, which I guess are looking for known vulnerabilities. I’m under the impression that there has been a lot of security vulnerabilities with Wordpress, so that excludes the topic for me, even if it had the perfect solution I first dreamed about.

All in all I am mostly satisfied with what I’ve learnt and seen so far. Hugo was fairly easy to install, the same was the themes. Hugo also delivers on speed, the entire site builds in milliseconds. I also like that it is written in Go since I’ve been exposed a little to the go language already through Caddy server and Goaccess. If you want to do something with the template engine in Caddy, it will sometimes refer to the Golang documentation and it seems similar to writing a theme in Hugo.

But as has been mentioned, I don’t want to do a deep dive into this right now, my main idea was to focus on coding. There is just so much it is possible to learn about, so much I think is interesting and want to know more about as well, but it can be considered a bit of procrastination for now.

I think I’ll create a page with the rabbit holes/timesinks I want to get back to later.