Hugo

This blog has just migrated from Jekyll to Hugo.

Why? Having programmed in Go for six years now I’m very comfortable with Go templates, which are the basis of Hugo templating. Also, speed is a feature, and hugo -D can rebuild this entire static site, all 2,700 pages, in under 2 seconds.

And while I am happy with Hugo now that I’ve gotten up to speed, the introductory documentation is missing a hugely important bit of trivia about Hugo configuration files and the templates, which is that case is ignored.

That is, if you have a configuration file that looks like this:

    baseURL = "https://example.org/"
    languageCode = "en-us"
    title = "My New Hugo Site"
    theme = "ananke"

You will later look at a template and see:

     {{ .Title | default .Site.Title }}

Which may cause you to scratch your head. As far as I can tell, Hugo doesn’t care about case at all, so .Site.Title could just as easily be written as .site.title, or .SiTe.TiTlE, and the same things goes for the config file, where case also doesn’t seem to matter:

    baseURL = "https://example.org/"
    languageCode = "en-us"
    TITLE = "My New Hugo Site"
    theme = "ananke"

will work just as well.

Another feature that I really like with Hugo is the simple post tagging functionality that’s built in, allowing me have a page of categorized posts. In the process I went back and added tags to many, but not all, of my posts. The tags, along with the Related Content functionality builds easy navigation paths among related posts. My favorite of these was bringing together all of my entries that have visualizations.

Oh, one more update about a footgun to avoid in the Ananke theme, it blocks all indexing by search engines by default.