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Comment by chrsstrm | Hacker News Reader

I’ve taught several non-technical people how to use Hugo and many of them still use it to this day on their own. It’s totally achievable after you understand just a few key concepts and pick a well-formed template to start with. And yes, Hugo is your best bet to keep things easy.

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Those key concepts are what I'm after. In every vid or article I'm learning from inevitably there's a point where I can see they pivot and lose me, and it's because I'm missing a key perspective or concept. I've yet to figure out what that actually is, which makes it hard to ask for advice! Cuz I don't have the question.

Yeah it’s hard when you don’t know what you don’t know. Your best bet is to go one on one with someone who understands you’re starting from zero. Catching someone who understands that will make a huge difference. Tech in general is absolutely amazing at continually making assumptions in instructions and documentation and it irritates me to no end. A couple hours one on one with a good teacher will crack the case quickly.

This has been my feeling all along. I think in every post I make I need to add that at the end (I'm starting from zero). Bc, understandably, people assume I know more than I do. And, yes. I need to find someone to give me a couple hours to help crack it open so I can better know what I don't know.

I haven't been able to figure it how to implement my Jekyll use case in Hugo, maybe you or someone else would be able to help me.

I don't want to use a theme at all because I don't really use it for making posts, but just a website with different pages. I have a page template that pulls in my head, nav, page content, and footer.

You can see an example here: https://github.com/etheralpha/clientdiversity-org/blob/main/...

Pretty basic stuff but when I checked out Hugo I was having the hardest time trying to figure out how to do it.

Yeah, Jekyll and Hugo treat pages differently. It does depend on what your intended URL format is going to be when building out your layouts. I’m on mobile so I can’t get into detail now how they differ, but you can’t drop Jekyll templates into Hugo and get them to work like that. I would actually download and study some free Hugo templates to learn by example how they treat pages. This tripped me up when I switched too, but for me it was worth it to move away from Jekyll.

[edit] I just want to add - pay attention to the content “type” in relation to creating a template and specifying the type in the frontmatter. https://gohugo.io/content-management/organization/#type may point you in the right direction. You can manifest your own type by creating a template in the correct layouts dir and then specifying that type in your frontmatter.

Do not use Hugo for this kind of setup. It's horrendously complicated and it was probably never meant to be used like this. Hugo might be good for a blog, but even a simple personal static site where you want to have different templates for each page is only achievable by jumping so many hoops.

This is my use-case (very simple, fully static site- not blog), and I'd love a tool to generate it from markdown. Do you happen to have a recommendation of a simpler tool for that?

I worked with middleman[0] before and it was much easier to setup for these kind of sites. It might not be as fast as Hugo but who cares if you change a page every other month.

[0] https://middlemanapp.com/

How do you go about teaching people that are outright hostile to the command line and anything that resembles code?

Currently dealing with a snobbish painter/graphic designer who has used Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe Muse for over 20 years and just wants their GUI WYSIWYG back.

Context. I might try something like “Frontpage is to MS Paint as writing code is to Adobe Illustrator. I’m not trying to teach you a child’s toy so you need to stick it out long enough to gain some perspective on this.” I’ve had success convincing people that the terminal isn’t “for hackers” by showing them the command line is really where everything happens like double clicking an icon is the same as running `open ~/Applications/Adobe/Creative \Cloud/Photoshop.app` and other normal operations performed with commands. It also helps to differentiate between things we’re doing just to operate/navigate vs. steps taken in the actual writing of code/building something. You can tell how much they understand by how literal they follow directions. I usually start with a whole lesson on using the command line so when we get to the actual meat of building they’ve seen many of the common commands before. It also helps if they’re on the clock and getting paid to learn vs. trying to pick a new skill on nights and weekends.

So, in light of this (great feedback), for someone like me who's primary motivation is to increase my computer literacy so I can make better and more informed choices on how I post/interact/hang out on the web, would you recommend that I start with what you're discussing: the command line?

My thinking: if I understood basic concepts and philosophy of coding and how the "the web works," I'd be able to build build myself a simple blog, simple website, but also be less beholden to Zuck and Google platforms. Obvs I'd still be using some of it, but I'd just have more choices.

Knowing how to use the command line will not automatically elevate your command of computers in and of itself. Operating your machine at a lower level by way of the command line will over time help you to gain more computing knowledge more as a side effect. There will come times where you will get stuck trying to use a command or series of commands or scripting something for automation and you will hit a wall - this is where you will discover the secret of all power users; knowing how to solve a problem. (Almost) no one here is a great programmer because they memorized an entire language or framework or OS. We’re great programmers because we know how to find information about our issue and apply that knowledge to come up with a solution. You make a mistake or come across something you’ve never seen before, you research and figure it out, your new knowledge helps you to not make that same mistake again and this just keeps repeating. All of computing knowledge is additive; low-level concepts and tools are the foundations for all layers of abstraction above them. So learning how to use a computer at a lower level will give you a proper base for understanding higher concepts and you’ll learn useful meta information along the way. Certainly everyone learns differently, but I would recommend diving into the command line if you want to do any sort of programming or just be a power user.

You could look at hooking up a static site generator to WordPress -- the Gutenberg WYSIWYG editor is really very impressive.

Or if they are using a Mac, just give them RapidWeaver.

Don’t try to make them love the terminal. They mostly won't, ever.

Just give them visual tools like Webflow, Blocs.app, Bootstrap Studio or even WordPress (now a complete visual page builder, from version 5.9 onwards).

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