Hello, blog!

I’ve wanted to blog on this website, but didn’t want to write pages by hand. Not when I’ve already tried static site generators like Hugo.

What’s Hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator - it takes content and generates web pages. So this Markdown document:

+++
title = 'Hello, blog!'
date = 2025-03-05T23:04:08Z
draft = false
summary = "My move to Hugo."
+++

I've wanted to blog on this website, but ...

Is easily turned into what you’re viewing right now.

Since it’s all static content, I can host it for free on GitHub Pages. This means it lacks the hosting overhead of something like WordPress, but is more automated than typing every line yourself.

Granted, I could just copy & paste templates, but writing in Markdown is more my preference.

Turning my website into a Hugo theme

If you look at Hugo Themes, you’ll see that there are plenty to get started with. But moving over from handwritten HTML and CSS to something like this is a great opportunity to make my own!

I based mine on the base theme Hugo includes, by running:

hugo new theme theme-name

The folder hierarchy seemed daunting at first, but if you’re not changing how the templates work then it’s just normal HTML/CSS/JS work - I really just tweaked my CSS for the theme.

Final thoughts

It was fun to finally do this, and relatively easy too! Hopefully I can make it count with my posts.