What? Why?

Yes, I’ve made my own blog. Super original, I know. But longform content is great, plus why not learn a few things along the way?

How?

I did some very light research and decided that using Hugo as the backbone of the Metal Chronicles would be the best solution for me. Hugo actually had pretty straightforward documentation, but you do have to look at the theme you want, and make sure you follow the quick start guide that best matches that theme, more on that in Theming.

What is Hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator which lets you view how your content looks before you publish. It’s perfect since I don’t need the dynamic capabilities of something like WordPress, rather I just need a more permanent outlet which won’t just switch up on me.

If you’re curious, here’s the Hugo Quick Start Guide.

Some commands you might like to know (that may or may not be exclusive to PaperMod)

  • Generate scaffold for a new hugo site: hugo new site YourSiteNameHere
  • Generate the actual site code: hugo
  • Making a new blog post: hugo new content posts/my-first-post.md For the above command to work, make sure that you have defaults setup in archetypes/post, such as the below.
---
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true
author: "Your name here"
description: "" 
tags: []
categories: []

# PaperMod Layout & Features
showToc: true
TocOpen: false
hidemeta: false
comments: false

# Cover Image (Optional)
cover:
    image: ""
    alt: "<text>"
    caption: "<text>"
    relative: false
---

The theming situation

Initially I considered the Pehtheme, however it turns out that TailwindCSS and NodeJS do not play well with basic Apache. After a bit more research I went with PaperMod. PaperMod itself is powerful, since there’s so much customisation that you can do. At first I thought it was easy, based on how much documentation there was availanle, so that’s the one I chose. Little did I know, it was not.

2 hours later, after lots of documentation reading, and many discussions with a certain tool, I got the page up and running.

If you want to find this page cool and want to also use PaperMod, follow their Installation Guide here. If you like the theme but want to set some defaults while still having access to future updates of the theme, or simply want a video tutorial, take a look at this YouTube video by Renee De Four Consulting. TL;DR is to make a layout/defaults directory in the Hugo root directory, and copy the inner theme structure, making modifications there. However the video itself is great at explaining how Hugo and PaperMod works, and would’ve saved me hours if I just watched it.

Also if you’re following this as a guide (please don’t), config.yaml is now hugo.yaml!

Was it worth it?

It will be, I just need to store all the commands somewhere, so that when I inevitably forget how this all works, I can still make another blog post.