The Hugo static website generator is an incredibly flexible site builder, but this very flexibility means that the way it matches page templates to page content can seem unclear. I’ve been using Hugo for some time now and I only ‘got it’ just recently. What follows is essentially a summary for my future reference, but hopefully it’ll help other Hugo users too.
I recently updated the masthead of my software-focused site, smittytone.net. In a fit of nostalgia, I recast it as a series of fonts that I’ve been fond of for years, all of them 1960s, 70s and 80s classics.
In the previous post, I showed how Hugo, a static website generator, can be used to build pages from structured data. This time I’m going to show how it can be used to use date information to flag recent site updates.
In this second look at building a website using Hugo, a static site generator, I’m going to explore how to assemble pages from structured data rather than written content.
One use-case for this is a release notes page in a site devoted to a software applications. Case in point: I wrote an app called Squinter which is a macOS tool for developing apps on the Electric Imp Platform. In addition to a page describing the software, I have a separate page which present the app’s release notes. Each note is prefixed with a lozenge indicating whether the note refers to a new feature, an enhancement to an existing feature, or is a bug fix.
After basing my software-oriented website on a hand-assembled set of pages, I recently decided it was time to introduce some automation. Suddenly there were too many pages that needed to be updated every time I released a new version of one of my apps. Additionally, I was writing more apps and utilities, so this process could only ever become more onerous if I continued with a manual set-up.
smittytone messes with micros 