blog now in hugo

i've been wanting to do this for a while but only finally got around to it... this site is now made in hugo! the theme is bear cub with tweaks to make it look... well almost exactly like it used to on zonelets.

on the left is the zonelets version (previous) & on the right is the hugo version (current) - pretty much the same, right?

i liked zonelets since it was simple, but i've been wanting to move over to a static site generator like hugo for a while because i didn't want to use javascript & i didn't like the trouble of having to update the post array myself every time hahaha...

with the new base though there is also a...

🎉 NEW FEED! 🎉

instead of using the default neocities one which is a bit messy i'm using the hugo-generated one - if you want to add the site feed to your feed reader, click the feed button in the navigation ✨

why hugo

hugo specifically i like for a number of reasons.

one of the big ones is multilingual support so my site is now in english & japanese! click the top right button to swap languages.

it also lets you write in markdown, which i like more than typing in raw html. hopefully now that i've switched i'll post more since there's less extra work & i can just type! it also makes it easier for me to read through my posts before posting.

i like how versatile hugo is for adding your own stuff in too... small stuff like being able to add shortcodes for things to make embeds easier & being able to type emoji with :text:

for example i set up bandcamp & itch.io shortcodes! so i can just type in {{< itch EMBEDCODEHERE >}} to embed a game.

(example!)

another nice thing about using a generator instead of just typing raw html means i can use the generator to automatically create smaller thumbnails for the gallery (instead of me manually creating thumbnails like i did in the past)... i've set it up so any image i put in a folder is automatically added to the gallery as a thumbnail & in full size so it's much less work to update the gallery now! (this is the addon i use.)

(i considered leaving js in for the gallery since it's nice to be able to page through the photos but i decided to just go all in so you'll have to individually click any images you want to see!)

how i did it

at first i actually wanted to host it on github & use github actions to automatically deploy to neocities (that's what we do for the tokyo indies site to github pages) but while i did get it working after some trial & error, honestly it felt like more work than it was worth so now i'm just using hugo to build locally 😅 hugo is so light anyway so it's not a big deal i think.

i used this neocities for reference on how to get everything set up! the idea for a .bat file for testing is very nice because also part of the reason i was so slow to get this set up was i didn't want to deal with opening terminal all the time just to check what my page would look like 😆

(showing off the bandcamp shortcode i got working thanks to the above blog haha - it's also where i got the idea to add the reading time to the blog posts... not sure if i will leave it, but i like it for now!)

also there are still no comments

i considered adding comments or a guestbook but in the end i still think i prefer this space as just mostly my own space to tend to.