I decided I should have a website again where I can publish my ramblings, discoveries or things I like to share. I also decided that I would not spin up some blog engine and start typing. No Wordpress or any other CMS. Just some Markdown files and a site generator.

Like most I ended up with Hugo, which I knew from name, but never worked with. My Markdown editor was decided way before that, I wrote my XBRL Quickguide already in Obsidian and was quite fond of it.

While reading my Mastodon feed I saw that https://mastodon.social/@Mdubbelm used her Holidays likewise and rebooted her website. After she confirmed that the combination Hugo and Obsidian could work fine I started my Hugo journey. When revisiting I saw that we’ve chosen the same theme, and believe me I’ve tried many, but switching is messy.

Setting up Hugo to work with Obsidian was a bit more difficult than using it with Pandoc and Latex, but that’s partly because of my desire to keep my Obsidian folder clean of Hugo stuff and Vice versa.

As always starting was easy, finishing not so much. It starts with the themes, Almost every theme has it’s own quirks, shortcodes, way of handling images, and fontmatter configurations. That makes switching from one theme to another all but trivial. Sometimes you need to adjust your frontmatter properties, sometimes you need to reconfigure your hugo.toml. Most of the time you need to do both.

In the end I decided to stick with the PaperMod theme and try to adjust it to my needs, i want thumbnails images in listview for example. It seems like Mastodon integration already works (after I add the toot-information).

Github Actions? I don’t think so. I’m hosting on my own machines and a simple rsync of the generated site would do the trick.