Why?

The inspiration to make a personal blog website came from my partner. He suggested that it could be a good idea to talk about some niche problems we’ve had to solve so that people who have the same issues don’t have to go through hell and back like we did fixing them.

Hugo

The reason I chose to use hugo was because I had previously used it a while ago to make a linktree-esque website for my music project. Back then I didn’t find it terribly difficult to use and thought it would be fairly easy.

what a mistake that was.

To be fair, the majority of the headaches that I got from making this was from html/css, not hugo itself. It didn’t help that the only programming language I knew going into this was bare-minimum python and going from that to Go was like changing DAW for fun. That being said, I feel like I still make the right choice in Hugo as there is a lot of online content about weird problems and issues people have. And with the almighty power of a search engine (and my partner) I managed to cobble this pseudo-functional website together.

My partner has a lot more to say about Hugo and Go, and will probably make his own blog post about his experience with them. His word is going to always be more valuable than mine about coding and comp-sci as he actually works in the field instead of me who mainly plugs in cables for a living. I’ll link his blog here once it’s up and running but until then just know he’s probably fuming.

Shiki Highlighting

While working on a future blog post I encountered that the default code highlighting that Hugo uses is a bit lackluster for my licking, especially with nix code. I found out that you can replace Hugo’s highlighting with Shiki highlighting pretty easily. I followed this webpage and the results are far better than what Hugo spits out. This also comes with the additional upside of Ayu theme support.

Why not another system like Jekyll or Django?

Familiarity bias? Honestly, I don’t fully know why I decided to go with Hugo. I think what happened is I found the theme that I wanted to modify quickly on Hugo and got tunnel-visioned on it to the point where I didn’t even consider working with anything else.

I did consider using Jekyll as a blog that was an inspiration for mine, crescentrose, uses it. I may still use Jekyll in the future if I get fed up with Hugo or find something I want to do with this website that can’t be done in Hugo. Learning another statis site generator is also a lot of work that I can’t be assed doing right now so I guess it’s Hugo for now.