Hugo Update

A new site?

I’ve switched the site to hugo. Before it was running as a hand built website from a few HTML pages, which was hard to keep track of due to the multilingual nature of it and the links not being inserted automatically.

Troubles

Fiddling with CSS is always equally fun and annoying for me. I’ve essentially copied my old theme based on sadgrls css layout maker and messed with it.

In particular, hugo when creating a new theme gives you a template for most files, including the css and how it’s tied in. I’ve changed the location of my stylesheet accordingly.

Fixing the CSS was easy but did require some googling. Firstly, my navbar didn’t have the appropriate CSS ID inserted onto it. Changing that was as simple as editing the menu.html file in my _partials folder.

One minor thing was editing the footer and header. Turns out when pasting your CSS blindly below some already set rules, you can inherit some foreign CSS rules. I was too hesitant to delete the files themselves, so I’ve just removed the rules inside the components files.

Missing content

Content will be added slowly as I feel like it. I’ve never been good at keeping my website regularly updated, but I hope hugo will make things easier.

Multilingual support, or, “Wo ist mein Deutsch hin?”

I love websites that cater towards people from different backgrounds. I personally love speaking english and regrettably speak german as well. Having friends who speak both languages, ideally it’d be great to have my content served to both english and german speakers.

Here is why it didn’t work out for me:

• Writing the same semantic text content in multiple languages is annoying. It requires both the structure/code of the site and it’s content to be translated.
• It kept breaking my old site. People kept reporting seeing the 404 page because my navigation would break. Apache2 does not make this easier either.
• As far as I know, most of my german speaking friends also speak enough english to navigate through this website.

Will I add german language support back to my website? Perhaps. But I think I’ll keep my Blog section in english.

The secret

I’ve hidden something. Based on some feedback on my old 404 page, I’ve implemented something new. Maybe you can find it based on this paragraph?

The future

Currently I am working on a few projects. Perhaps you will find more Plan 9 related postings by me in the future. I would also like to replace my habit of posting instagram stories by serving temporary pages under something like “motd.nette-i.de”. MOTD means Message of the Day. Currently I am thinking of making a secret internal website to add content to MOTD, and then generating a cronjob to delete the post after 24 hours have passed. This requires some CGI stuff and some web app shenanigans most likely. Stay posted for the future!