Now With Hugo!
2026-04-20
As you may (or may not) have noticed, a few weeks ago I remade my website in Hugo!
What’s that
Hugo is a static site generator, so you can make content .md files and Hugo will automatically generate all the boilerplate HTML nonsense. You can also have different templates for different page types (e.g. Section index, content page, etc.) and Shortcodes to quickly put different custom elements!
Why
Mainly it’s just easier to write things, more like how Gemini pages are written. (I do want to put this site on gemini and may do so soon hehe) Aside from that, this website is also completely static now! (Before it used SSIs for the header and footer, which made it dependent on a webserver that supported SSIs.) With a static website, a webserver e.g. NGINX (or nginx idk how tf its capitalised) is no longer needed!
Cool shortcode things
I’ve made some shortcodes that do cool things like make a download link (and automatically write the size for me)
This code
- {{< download nose.jpg >}}
Makes this:
I also have one for adding images with captions below and also handling different formats:
{{< media/image src="nose.jxl,nose.jpg" label="sniff sniff" >}}
sniff sniff
Automatic RSS feeds!
You may have noticed an orange RSS button on the Category pages; those are auto-generated RSS feeds generated by Hugo!
I made a custom pixel art-ish icon for it. I like that kind of style because it reminds me of Windows XP/7 era icons.
“NEW!” tag
The “NEW!” tag is now auto-applied to items that are new, and categories in the top bar that have new content! Before I would need to manually add and remove the tag when I added something. That’s probably not that exciting but I still like it.
Things to do next
Next I want to configure Hugo to generate Gemini pages as well, so I can get my gemcapsule back up! I’ve been a little obsessed with gemini recently… Also I’m making software to measure uptime on various Gemini hosts, something I started a few years back when I first found out about it.
Anyway bye!!