Building Websites With Hugo

So I have two problems that I have been needing to solve:

First, I have been needing to mirror my content somewhere other than YouTube. I understand that many do no want to be forced to use YouTube to watch my content. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and mirror my content on my own website.

Second, for years I've complained about the web being slow and bloated. Part of the problem is that most websites today are dynamic, using things like MySQL databases and PHP, when really a static website would suffice. So I'm creating my own website using Hugo, a static site generator.

REFERENCED:

WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL?

SOCIAL PLATFORMS:
💬 IRC: irc://freenode #distrotube

DT ON THE WEB:

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I USE:

Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[theowaldburg]

Whenever I wanna try out something new, DistroTube posts a video about that topic out of the blue :D.
Can't complain, it is good stuff. Keep it up

[GeoffGroves]

Really digging Hugo and this is by far the best primer I've seen. Great job and thank you!

[zeloguy]

I started in web design in '96 coming originally from a programming background. I remember the days where even variables where one letter (namely x, I, n) instead of the "descriptive" variables we have today. My first site was just as you describe... a minimalist (in size, not form/function) site cutting corners wherever I could. I completely agree with your assessment and may even say you low-balled just how many sites are data-driven sites that have no reason to be so other than convenience. I have been looking at Hugo, Jekyll, Middleman, Pelican... among others. Although leaning towards Jekyll I will definitely have one of my new sites written in HUGO and get back to you on the results.


Just stumbled by your channel and hit the subscribe button before the video was ½ way through. Great job and I look forward to perusing your other videos!

[SuddenPlanet-DTR]

Hey Derek, do you mind telling us if you started from a Hugo Theme, or did you build your site from scratch? If it was a theme, can you tell us which one you used?
Also you have a great "Radio Voice"! Thanks!

[gabrieleiro]

databases, server side templating engines (such as php), and requests to the backend in general are far from being one of the reasons the modern web is slow
the client has evolved over the past years and it's more complicated now. forms, fancy animations, fully-featured dashboards and things complex like that are built with equally complex javascript frameworks such as react, angular, vue, etc. sometimes some applications don't even use such modern advanced ui building tools, but they make requests to other websites that use ancient or just really big javascript sources.


i work on a big company that has a very poor lighthouse ranking on many applications because for contractual reasons we have to synchronously load some third-party comscore javascript that takes ages for the browser to parse.

[aristotelispapageorgiou]

Happy new year DT. Thanks for one more little diamond that you have discovered...

[KeepItTechie]

I'm definitely interested in this for my site. About to install now. Thanks DT!!

[JeffHendricks]

Something I figured out: I was trying to use a theme, and never could get the site logo to link correctly.
Once I edited config.toml ([params] logo = "") it still wouldn't work. Turns out everything, including <img> tag links, uses /content as the root folder. And when you link images or subfolders, you have to include the leading "/" for it to find it. So I put the logo in "/content/images/logo.png" and linked it with logo = "/images/logo.png"

This wasn't documented very well at all, it was a lot of trial and error.

[dave]

The method I have been using with Jekyll (which is similar to Hugo but it is Ruby based) is scaffold the site as you described and use a service like Bitbucket, Azure Devops etc as a Code repo i.e. use Git with one of these third party services.

I then setup a pipelines.yml file which configures the build commands, package the build output and update the website. I can set this so it builds this when I merge a merge request say into a branch like develop or master in git.

This give you a few advantages:

1) It enforces a proper publishing route for changes. This is important if you are working as part of a team.
2) I can essentially drop the build artifact anywhere I want after it is built. I am using S3 buckets and deploying the static HTML site there and server it for free.
3) I can also see the entire history of what was published and when and can easily revert any changes in the site.

[LutherusPandragon]

Finaly someone recognises Hugo. If we are luck in 2020 there will be no more java, web developers will stop using javascript and they will focus on security

[MaciejKurzyca]

Happy New Year Derek! Thanks for your videos, they are very interesting and helpful to me.
Finally the right page :-) Very nice look, clear and legible
Hugo is now on my to-do list.

[JeffHendricks]

Going to be moving away from Wordpress as soon as I find a good static backend replacement. I've looked at Hugo, but the documentation (especially dealing with templates or images and paths) is a bit confusing. I'm going to figure it out, but wish it was a little clearer.

[Horror-Weekly]

If it's just HTML on the server, how would a user search for a specific page?

I'd like to see more videos about Hugo, especially if there's a way to do searches.

[tofraley]

I was JUST watching one of your videos on Gopher, and my mind immediately went to Hugo!
It sounded like you were really just frustrated with slow load times caused by dynamically generated sites, not HTTP as a protocol. That, and having to deal with a bloated CMS.

[almighty-bladder]

I've started trying out Hugo and I'm surprised at how easy it is to use.

Hugo can also render .org files nicely. Emacs+Hugo = awesome.

[GrimDigital]

If you know HTML and CSS you will make a static site in no time.Good video btw DT.Your videos are always good.Thank you!

[texaslinux]

This was great DT! Would love to see more Hugo videos.

[simon]

Your site looks really good! One thing though, the recent videos section has a bit of placeholder text that you might want to replace... Don't know if it's auto generated by the theme.

[underlecht]

Short, honest and accurate video. All i needed. Thank you. Great stuff.

[sasakanjuh]

This looks cool! Hugo seems like a really interesting option to consider :)