Blog revamp and starting to understand Hugo better

I’d decided to make the switch to a blogging workflow that I could use with Emacs back in December and wrote about setting it up from scratch. Since I wasn’t yet acquainted with writing original layout templates, style-sheets or with organising content into sections in as simple and sane a manner as I wanted to, I’d settled for outsourcing most of this to a fairly basic theme. Over time, I grew dissatisfied with how the site looked and how it organised my content and so I spent some time customising the theme, which took a while to figure out. I wasn’t happy with it still. I then tried changing themes a few times but couldn’t find anything that really worked for me. That I didn’t want any JavaScript I didn’t understand, or could understand for that matter, effectively eliminated a lot of the options I had considered.

It then dawned on me that I could maybe attempt writing a theme for myself from (nearly) scratch when I found two themes that seemed to check out most of my requirements. The first of these was rocinante by Sid Verma, a great and adequately minimal theme with added support for photo albums as posts. My only qualms with it were the somewhat messy style sheets and cryptic templates that made personalising a bit of an ordeal. The second, however, was simply genius and it took me close to no time to figure it out, despite thinking it to be too advanced for me — there was no theme sub-module and everything was in the home directory it was from somebody’s personal website.

Needless to say, it was Drew DeVault’s and I’d seen it as something of an inspiration from the start. A quick glance at Drew Devault’s blog should convey what I mean by minimal and functional. I jumped right into a local clone of his sourcehut repo and got down to making it my own. I added some minor spice to the `single.html` layout under `blog` and made an additional few for

1. posts from my Wordpress blog I didn’t want listed on the homepage
2. a section index that listed the above
3. fiction (just the one post)
4. an About me page (not a section, unlike before)
5. the browser friendly copy of my Literate Emacs Configuration with a table of contents in the sidebar and heading anchors.

I realised I didn’t want unnecessary taxonomy pages like before or like those from the rocinante theme and that all my regular blog posts, Emacs configuration and fiction on the homepage. The prospect of having to write descriptions for each of these — had I maintained separate sections for each like before — was daunting, to say the least.

I also loved the idea of displaying “featured posts” from the blogs I follow through Drew’s own openring, written in Go. The only issue I encountered was with adding this to the Github actions workflows since it’s not as straightforward as the one Sourcehut uses and the absurdly large number of modules is mind-boggling. Until I find a way of getting this automated, I’ll have to keep at running the command manually every few days before committing/pushing changes.

openring \
    -s https://drewdevault.com/blog/index.xml \
    -s https://sourcehut.org/blog/index.xml \
    -s https://ambikamath.com/feed/ \
    < webring-in.template \
    > layouts/partials/webring-out.html

There were also some issues with date handling in the ox-hugo setup and I ended up rewriting the org-capture template to allow for entries into both the main blog section and the miscellaneous one. The capture template now looks like this:

(with-eval-after-load 'org-capture
  (defun org-hugo-new-post-capture ()
    "Returns `org-capture' template string for new Hugo post.
See `org-capture-templates' for more information."
    (let* (;; http://www.holgerschurig.de/en/emacs-blog-from-org-to-hugo/
           (date (format-time-string (org-time-stamp-format :long :inactive) (org-current-time)))
           (title (read-from-minibuffer "Post Title: ")) ;Prompt to enter the post title
           (fname (org-hugo-slug title))
           (section (plist-get org-capture-plist :section))
           (lastmod (plist-get org-capture-alist :lastmod)))
      (mapconcat #'identity
                 `(
                   ,(concat "* DRAFT " title)
                   ":PROPERTIES:"
                   ,(concat "" section)
                   ,(concat ":EXPORT_FILE_NAME: " fname)
                   ,(concat ":EXPORT_HUGO_AUTO_SET_LASTMOD: " lastmod)
                   ;; Enter current date and time
                   ,(concat ":EXPORT_DATE: " date)
                   ":END:"
                   ;; Place the cursor here finally
                   "%?\n")
                 "\n")))

  (setq org-capture-templates
        ;;`org-capture' binding + h
        '(("h"
           "Hugo blog post"
           entry
           (file+olp "~/my_gits/brihadeesh.github.io/content-org/blog/posts.org" "Posts")
           (function org-hugo-new-post-capture)
           :section ":EXPORT_HUGO_SECTION: blog"
           :lastmod "t")

          ;; `org-capture' binding + m
          ("m"
           "Hugo miscellaneous blog post"
           entry
           (file+olp "~/my_gits/brihadeesh.github.io/content-org/blog/posts.org" "Miscellaneous")
           (function org-hugo-new-post-capture)
           :section ":EXPORT_HUGO_SECTION: misc"
           :lastmod "f"))))

That’s about it for now. I deliberately kept this brief and avoided discussing a bunch of tangential points like design choices and the “criteria” for making this the best starting point for my blog. I’ll perhaps cover those in later articles.