Blog With Hugo

An Introduction to the 'Blog with Hugo' series

I wanted to have a blog where I could share my thoughts and ideas. Naturally I quickly discovered WordPress and started fiddling around with it. In this series I’ll tell you why I chose to go with a static site generator called Hugo instead and how you can do it too. The idea of this series is to help you learn while doing.

If you want to go the static web page route with Hugo you have basically two choices, either use a ready theme or create your own. I decided to go with the homebrewn option because I felt that the ready themes didn’t match with how I envisioned the site should look.

In this series I am going to show you how to start a theme from scratch. But if you want to go with a ready theme I still recommend that you read through these pages as they’ll help you understand how Hugo works and hopefully help you customize your site.

I want you to have the resource that I would’ve needed when starting out.

In the last post of the series we touched the surface and learned what Hugo is. This time we will dive deeper and actually create our first example site with a ready theme.

Now that we know how the basics of Hugo it’s time to take a step further and start building our own theme. This post will lay the foundations for our theme so it won’t look like much in the beginning but it will be something that we can build on. We have lots of content to cover so let’s get going!

Last time we finally started creating our own theme and we were able to render something on the home page. We also created a template for the page head so that our pages will always contain the necessary metadata and information for social sharing. Next we’re going to create the basic layout for our page.

In this post we will create a template for single blog posts on our Hugo blog. The end result will be a clean and simple page with support for a featured image. It will also show the author, an author image, publish date and the estimated reading time.

Now that our blog has a basic single post template it is time to move on to other content pages. In this post we will concentrate on pages such as About, Privacy Policy and Contact.

Even though the site itself is static it is possible to embed dynamic content from other sources. For example, the contact page will show you how to embed Google Forms as a contact form and a map showing your office location.

Until now we have concentrated on single pages such as blog posts or special pages. While we do already have a basic and functional list page for our blog it isn’t particularly pretty.

So in this post you will learn how to create a decent looking layout to display multiple blog posts on a single page.

You may have noticed that many blogs like to promote other posts at the end of an article. Hugo can do this too with its related content feature. This means that you don’t have to hand pick those related posts for each new piece of content you write but you can let Hugo do it for you automatically. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you can see a live example on this very page.

Comments are an important part of communicating with your audience. This is where static pages struggle a bit as they are immutable by design. To add comments to a Hugo (or any other static) blog you need to resort to some third party solution. Personally I’m using ReplyBox but Disqus works with Hugo out of the box so it would be the easy way.

In this post I’ll show you how to add Disqus or ReplyBox to your site but I will also talk about other alternatives.

Even though you can add normal HTML markup to your Markdown files in Hugo it doesn’t always mean that you should. Complicated or reusable pieces of code should preferably be abstracted away from the content. Custom shortcodes can help with this issue as they let you define snippets that can be added to the page and configured with parameters.

In this series we haven’t created the home page yet so in this post we are finally going to create a simple one with the help of some custom shortcodes.

Now that our custom Hugo blog is more or less ready it’s time to make it public by publishing it online. In this post I will go through all the required steps. And the best part is that you only need to pay for the domain!

Now that you should have your blog online here are some tips on getting started with the writing process. In this post I share how I manage the content in my blog.

It is quite easy to recommend your most popular posts to your readers if you are running a WordPress site. What if you are using a static site generator such as Hugo instead? On this post you’ll learn how to add a popular posts section by using data from Google Analytics, and how to automate the whole process.

In this series of been talking about really technical topics.This is going to be a softer post where I’m going to talk about what is and what is not important when you are starting a brand new blog. I hope this post will inspire you to get going and keep going!

So far we have been using the CDN version of Bulma. However, this has the unfortunate property that we cannot really customize the colors and other parameters. We can solve this by using Hugo pipes to process the Bulma source code with the built-in SASS processor.

Would you like to be able to schedule the blog posts for your static site into the future but don’t want to use up all of your free Netlify build quota? In this post we’ll create a GitHub Actions workflow that triggers a site rebuild when a post has been scheduled to be published.

RSS might not be as fashionable as it was many years ago, but it’s still a great way to easily stay up to date with your favorite sites. If you have a Hugo site, you probably already have a working RSS feed. You just might not know about it!