My main project this week was to get Hugo set up properly for my website, so that I can update it easily. After trying a couple of ready-made themes, I decided to start from scratch instead. Like many things, it felt like it would be easier in the long run if I had a deep understanding of what’s going on, and there’s no better way to learn than by doing.

I downloaded a copy of Bootstrap into a blank Hugo theme and got to work. Many of the typographic choices got copied from my previous website, but now everything is set up modularly— The next time I publish a paper or write a brief note about what I did over the weekend, I just need to write a new markdown file and everything will be formatted like the ones I already have.

The website design isn’t done, of course— This is the sort of project that’s never finished. I don’t care for the current rendering of the navbar or titles, for instance. But I’ve at least got everything migrated that existed on the old website, so it’s now ok to replace it with this one.

Also, everything on the home page is set up using Hugo’s content view system inside Bootstrap’s 12-column grid, so I can mix things up relatively easily by defining new post types. I’ll probably end up doing that at some point for things like photo galleries or video projects, as the two post types I have right now are very text-centric.