What is Text?

Now that you have a mostly functional site, you’ll need to get content into it. Luckily, Hugo makes that easy! Markdown is a simple but expressive syntax which makes creating formatted text simple and streamlined. GitHub uses it to format commits, Microsoft Docs makes heavy use of Markdown, and now you know that Hugo’s text-to-HTML strategy is Markdown as well.

Style!

In a previous article we set up Hugo, and got it running locally. If you didn’t do any styling, or download a Hugo theme, then your site probably looks pretty sad right now. In this article, I’ll go through how you can get SCSS and Material up and running for your Hugo site.

Partials: the Bread and Butter

By now you should have most of the tools you need to work on your website, the configuration you’ll want for your site, and the bare basics of SCSS styling. We’re not far away from plugging along making posts left and right. After this article you should be able to basically get going with making content for your website.

This is one of the first web projects that I’ve worked on for myself. Most other stuff I’ve worked on is enterprise-level stuff: .NET commerce portals, Reporting sites on MEAN stack, and .NET Framework stuff that originally used those Website Forms.

For a blogging site, you don’t really need all that. At worst you’re getting hit by a bunch of people once, and then they can get your sweet cached pages. Most of the time, you’re not getting a lot of traffic, and you don’t need a whole framework to handle that.

The Goal: A Site of Your Own

I really wanted a website. I’ve wanted one since starting my career as a web developer, and it’s finally here after about 6 years of mostly procrastination.

You can totally do this in a weekend (if you don’t do what I did) and try to spin up things so you have as much control of the components as possible, sure. But if you’re like me, when you read about site builders like Hugo, Jekyll, and Gatsby, and they tell you that you can make your website, the thought is a alluring.