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Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

Hugo is still most convenient, at least for me and my workflow. I just pull it with homebrew, created my theme/template, write blogposts in Emacs org-mode (using ox-hugo), host it on GH pages for free, and use custom domain and free tier cloudflare.

I am really enjoying bare essentials I got, very streamlined process that does the job for me. This looks interesting, I really like minimalist aspects of software, but what ain't broken don't fix it.

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Hugo is nice and extremely fast. But one thing that I find unintuitive in Hugo is how the layout files are arranged. I can never remember them without referring to the documentation or the source files of an existing Hugo site everytime I need to create a new Hugo site.

For example, the base layout template needs to go to themes/<THEME>/layouts/_default/base.html but the layout for a blog needs to go to themes/<theme>/layouts/<TYPE>/single.html. Then there is list type layout too to define the blog index pages. Is the home page a single page or a list page? Can the entire home page be defined as a base template? It gets confusing.

Then the whole {{ define <BLOCK> }} and {{ block <BLOCK> }} syntax to embed one template in another is quite unintuitive as well. I think Jekyll has much more sane layout that is easy to keep in head. Also in Jekyll one can define list pages without any special naming convention just by using its templating for-loops. I find Hugo less intuitive than others but the fact that Hugo does not require me to learn Ruby is a win.

Custom written shell commands or Python code or even plain SSI includes are a great way to host static content too.

Another free solution that may involve even less setup is Netlify's free tier, which includes 1-click HTTPS setup on a custom domain and reruns Hugo every time you push to the repo.

Moi? I love the idea of minimal. KISS is a wonderful thing.

That said, anything more and a handful of pages (and especially something blog-y) needs search. Else the UX could take on too much friction.

A couple weeks ago I saw something about a tool Facebook OS'ed for doing project documentation. I believe that was static and had search. I think. Unfortunately, I didn't go so far as to see if you could fake a (not for docs) website with it.

There's lunr.js, this collection of bits of docs might be useful to look at about search in a Hugo site : https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/how-to-add-lunr-js-to-your-sit...

> That said, anything more and a handful of pages (and especially something blog-y) needs search. Else the UX could take on too much friction.

I've added search functionality to static sites before and the various JavaScript libraries available for this like lunrjs.com are super fast and easy to integrate. You can create a static search index at build time from a JSON file of your core content (probably a few 100KB compressed for many sites) and the search as you type functionality is instant which can be a better UX than other solutions.

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. I didn’t even know to go looking for something like this, but it will be perfect for a site I have.

Yea. Thanks.

I'm not very (I mean, at all) conversant with Javascript. So stuff like Gulp, Grunt, etc is outside my comfort zone. But one fine day, someone posts step-by-step tutorial[1] on how to set up static site search using Fuse.js on Hugo sites without Gulp, Grunt, etc., and I am finally able to set up search[2] on my Hugo generated blog in no time.

[1]: https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/site-search-implemented-using-... [2]: https://scripter.co/search/

Alright - I like your website layout: https://defphil.com/

But to be fair, some people may want different features than the bare minimum. Also, even if Hugo is the most convenient as an org-mode user, I highly doubt it'd be the most convenient for others (who don't use org-mode lol).

Also, you should write more posts!

The Hugo generated site features can vary with the theme used (I believe there are 200+ options), and the features can get as detailed as a user wants if they just template their own site.

Ox-hugo that the OP mentioned is just an Emacs package that exports Org to Markdown + front-matter (without having to manually specify many of be front matter data in the Org source.. most of it is auto derived.).

I still haven’t wrote any posts, I just finished website few days ago. But thanks for stopping by. :)

Hey! Ox-hugo dev here. Do you have your site source (Org source) public? I am just collecting Ox-hugo Org source repos, that I plan to publish on the ox-hugo doc site (of source, that won't happen if you don't wish, even if your source is public).

For folks, if interested in seeing an example of the Org source, and ox-hugo + Hugo generated site, here's the source[1] of my blog[2].

More: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/#demo

[1]: https://gitlab.com/kaushalmodi/kaushalmodi.gitlab.io/raw/mas... [2]: https://scripter.co

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