Story
It was a tedious setup to be honest, and looking back I question if it would have been better starting from scratch than using a theme and slowly trimming it down to what I wanted. However I’ve had serious trouble designing things how I want with html/css in the past so I did not want to go down that rabbit hole again so here we are for now. Thanks to the lightbi theme btw!
So then what is hugo?
It’s a static site generator, not one that actually gives you design tools (which I am quite surprised doesn’t exist actually, can I take a moment to say how does this not exist yet??? Maybe I am oblivious and have somehow evaded finding one, anyways)
But a generator that helps you manage the coding of html.
Specifically I think the biggest part of it is that it tackles a large issue of html. Html by default is, a markup language, not really code, and so if you have repeating bits you have to copy and paste those to repeat. Hugo lets you put in code blocks to insert one block of html into another html file. You then run the program, it parses your code and does the insertion itself, and spits out a bunch of processed html files that you chuck into github to host. I think hugo does much more from what I saw than just that? But that seems to be the key part I at least was after, and the themes make use of this by default as well as have some good css that I did not want to spend hours making.
Now it wouldn’t be thatt bad copy pasting elements in normal html, I mean if you just have a basic site with a few words you can just make it. I wanted to much more easily put up written descriptions and blog-type things like this onto my site and it was simply tedious and in the way of what I wanted to accomplish. Now that I know how hugo works better and how fun it is to work with it I would probably redo this site from scratch if I had to again, but I’m sure it would turn out a little worse design-wise.
Alright that’s all I wanted to type out, I’ll probably make more stuff like this because I like the idea of documenting my thoughts over time and seeing the little personal projects I work on, and now instead of everything on my site being purely web projects, I can easily make a little post with a download link or something which could be fun.