I’ve been thinking about setting up a new blog that didn’t depend on an RDBMS for a while. I tried out a number of options and struggled with Hugo, my choice for a bit. One of my big issues was getting something that looked the way I wanted.
There are lots of Hugo themes available. The problem was a combination of two things.
First Hugo is being developed and improved at a rapid pace. This is awesome. But it means that some themes that caught my eye didn’t really work well because they were a little old. Someone who really knows what they are doing could probably fix those issues quickly but that’s issue number two.
I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m slowly learning, but Hugo and static site generation was really new for me. I totally get the idea, but I had no experience with how it’s implemented. It’s a little confusing at first and I’m not the kind of person that can just sit and read through all the documentation first. I like to dig in, mess around, break stuff and so on. The problem was I had some difficulty finding a suitable starting point.
Well the Blackburn theme finally got me fixed up. It worked well out of the box, and the tweaks I’ve made to it so far have really helped me to learn how the whole system works. I am pretty stoked to finally have something I feel ok with publishing.
At the same time I worked out how to properly set up Atom to help me manage the site. That will be a post of its own - but for now I’m really liking where things are at.