I’ve been using the Blackburn theme for this site for a while. I’ve made some small changes and I’ve struggled a little to know where I should make those changes - in the theme or in the core of my site. Probably this struggle is more an issue of my getting my head around Hugo but it also comes from the fact that while separating content from how it is displayed is an awesome idea, it’s never as easy as it seems to completely keep the two apart all the time.
Regardless as I contemplated some bigger changes and how I would manage those, I decided to fork Blackburn. So starting today the site is using Pureburn, my fork of Blackburn.
I looked at the github repo for Blackburn and it looks pretty inactive. There are some pretty old pull requests and I could have maybe tried to get in touch with the author, but it has a very permissive license so I thought, “Why not?”.
I’ve got a link to my sourcehut repo for the theme but it’s not public yet. I’ve got some more things to do before I can make it available. I need to finish working on the example site, get some new screen shots and put in place some other changes I intend to make. As it is now the site is really not much different but I think I’ll be making more significant departures from Blackburn in the near future.
It’s been a great learning experience. I have a lot more to learn but digging in like this has been much more helpful than just reading documentation. Again, I’m sure it’s just me, but I find a lot of the Hugo docs hard to understand. Practically messing around with it is helping it to click more in my head.
I’m hoping I can hit a point where I can produce some tutorials that are a little more advanced. I see tuts developed for absolute beginners ( “Create your first Hugo site in 5 minutes” and so on) all the time but I see a lot less content for what to do when you want to go beyond installing Hugo, a theme and then deploy.