About a year ago, to put a cap on my struggles with Hugo, I wrote up some thoughts on the whole static-site-generator (SSG) concept. One point I made concerned the amount of “meta-data management” that the typical SSG does: creating tag collections; creating sitemaps, and so on. And what a pity it is, that most SSGs don’t seem to surface this information in a way that would be usable by other tools.
Having used Hugo for a some years now, while creating a few dozen entries, I have discovered a few “best practices” for organizing the raw (Markdown) content.
This site is generated using Hugo. Getting the site up and running was nothing short of a nightmare, which I have documented elsewhere. But things are working now, and Hugo makes adding new content very easy indeed. It therefore seems a good opportunity to reflect back and revisit the whole “Static Site Generator” a.k.a. “JamStack” topic, from a greater distance.
I just wasted one hour and five minutes, dealing with two of these opaque, unexpected, and almost undiagnosable showstopper roadblocks that Hugo will throw your way - much too often, in my opinion.
Hugo is a static site generator: it takes some plain-text content, marries it to a bunch of HTML templates, and produces a set of complete, static HTML pages that can be served by any generic, stand-alone web server. Simple.
I have compiled my various write-ups on the Hugo site generator into a single, consecutive guide.
I came across an unexpected problem when using Mathjax in a Markdown document (to be used with the Hugo site generator).
Getting Hugo to work with Mathjax (or vice versa) to create these pages took a little bit of fiddling and some trial-and-error.
Having managed to produce this site using the Hugo static site generator, it’s time to reflect and collect my impressions.
The Hugo static site generator takes some plain-text content, marries it to a bunch of HTML templates, and produces a set of complete, static HTML pages that can be served by any generic, stand-alone web server. It selects templates based on the type of the content, and its position in the filesystem.