Almost all customizations for Hugo websites can be done using configuration. The configuration is stored in the single place the hugo.yaml file at the root folder of the website. Hugo comes with the hugo.toml (TOML) but I prefer to use YAML for my configurations. Hugo also supports JSON if you like it more.

Documentation is nice and descriptive. I found several guidelines about what should be included into the config file. The following is my experience with the configuration, a couple of “learned lessons” and the list of settings I found useful. While I write it here in some creative chaotic order, in the file I ordered all of them alphabetically so it is easy for me to find if I just scroll through.

I often (re-)use the same laptop to work in different projects that have to be committed to Github under different identities. By “identities” I do not mean different Github accounts. I sign my commits with SSH key registered at Github to emails that are associated with my Github account. Different types of projects are supposed to sign with different emails and keys. I could call git config... each time or maintain multiple .gitconfig files in different directories. However, there is more effective way IMHO. The way is to use includeif setting of the Git configuration. This is how it works.

Welcome, this is the first post in my new blog. I found only two reasons for doing self-hosted blog:

1. I can select the engine and formatting instead of getting annoyed with limitations of managed (although free) platforms such as Medium.
2. Controlling blog hosting makes it more resilient compared to external hosting that is driven by business dedcisions over which I have no control.

So, I decided to do an experiment with creating a blog website and in a year (it will be March, 2025) to run a retrospective of the blog hosting and maintenance and decide whether I will continue with the project. Until then I will mirror most of the materials to my blog on Medium.