Hugo

I wanted to introduce a support for “series” ‒ an ordered collection of posts about the same topic. For example, this post is the 4th post in the series “Getting Started with Hugo”. And I wanted to enable navigation between different posts from the same series instead of just going to “next” or “previous” post in the blog. I looked on internet and found many articles about how to do it using Hugo. The posts that I found used older versions of Hugo because of configuration parameters and methodology that they used. I learned from these posts and came with my own implementation.

Hosting

After a brief review of the selected Hugo settings, let’s review the decisions about hosting. I used only two criteria when I was choosing hosting for my blog website:

• Convenience – the service should be simple to use, allow automation, to have both CLI and Web interface and, ideally, familiar
• Costs – it should be cheap or, ideally, it should be free

The choice for the website source code management was straightforward. Github answers both criteria. It is simple. Supports automations via workflows and actions. And I work with it everyday. Needless to say that it is free (for now).

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.

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.