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+++ title = "Moving to Hugo" lastmod = 2024-11-18T18:24:24+01:00 tags = ["hugo", "web", "orgmode", "css", "tufte"] categories = ["tech", "emacs"] draft = false meta = true type = "list" [menu] [menu.posts] weight = 3012 identifier = "moving-to-hugo" +++
It's been a long time since I started using the ox-tufte exporter to keep and maintain my website. However, I have had issues with it; one of the larger ones being that it's a pain in the butt to remember how it all works when I want to change the structure of it.
I also was a little tired of the look and layout; being presented with an endless table of contents isn't the best experience one could hope for online.
Not to worry, I am in the midst of migrating most of my writing to Hugo!
Naturally, since I am a lover of prose and dearly enamored with sidenotes, I opted for the hugo-tufte theme. However, I immediately found some unpleasantness in it.
While I can and do appreciate whitespace, there is such a thing as too much. So I spent a number of hours fixing up the CSS (and a few minor things) more to my liking. at the same time, I realized that there are some limitations.
I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say I forked the repo and started messing with it. I'm not familiar or even remotely good with CSS/ HTML/ Hugo, so please don't expect miracles{{}}Also called 'clean code.'{{}}.
Most of my changes were minor; color scheme adjustments, decreasing the massive margins between the elements, getting some styling on the margin and side notes, and such.
One thing that I realized quickly was that the way sidenotes are implemented leads to them overlapping when they're close together; I have yet to find a solution for that, so for the time being, I am choosing to simply make the sidenote font smaller so they don't.
Other than that... I'm really happy with it.
Of course, I didn't stop there. Being the crazy person that I am, I wanted to automate deployment of my website through git.
And so I did. You can find the repo here. The important bit lies on the server side.
I'm using a git hook to automatically purge and re-build the /public directory after each commit. I don't get enough traffic for this to be an inconvenience.
I used some of this article by Jason Murray to help me understand how git hooks work. I'm running Forgejo, and this is a much more elegant and simple solution when compared to running Actions or other CI/CD tools.
The post-receive hook is like so:
#!/bin/bash
# Directory on the server where the website will be mapped.
export GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/bajsicki.com
echo `pwd`
echo "post-receive: Generating https://bajsicki.com with Hugo..."
# Create the directory and all subdirectories if they don't exist.
mkdir -p $GIT_WORK_TREE
chmod 755 $GIT_WORK_TREE
# Remove any files already in the public directory, a fresh copy will be generated by hugo
rm -rf $GIT_WORK_TREE/public
# Generate the site with hugo
cd $GIT_WORK_TREE && chmod +x update.sh
cd $GIT_WORK_TREE && ./update.sh
# Fix any permission problems.
find $GIT_WORK_TREE/public -type f -print | xargs -d '\n' chmod 644
find $GIT_WORK_TREE/public -type d -print | xargs -d '\n' chmod 755
echo "post-receive: Hugo site generation complete"
The update.sh script is as dead simple as things get.
#!/usr/bin/env sh
cd themes/hugo-tufte/
git reset --hard && git pull origin main -f
cd ../..
git reset --hard && git pull origin main -f
hugo
In short... it just works, and I can easily transition my blogging/ websites to Hugo without compromising on my org-mode addiction.
All thanks to ox-hugo, which made the process very easy, since I already had all of my articles in org-mode format in the first place.
I guess the last thing to mention are the sidenotes and margin notes... sadly, the way to use them with ox-hugo is quite cumbersome. My current process is to keep these two snippets in the kill-ring{{}}I will be moving them to yasnippet... at some point.{{}}, so I can easily insert them when needed.
@@hugo:{{</*sidenote*/>}}
{{</*/sidenote*/>}}@@
Then an example of it would look like this{{}}Or maybe not, I'm not sure.{{}}.
@@hugo:{{</*sidenote*/>}}Or maybe not, I'm not sure.{{</*/sidenote*/>}}@@
The same formatting applies to marginnote.
As you may notice, there is an issue. For some reason the hugo-tufte theme doesn't treat the sidenote number/ indicator as only a character, but adds a whitespace after it as well. This can lead to some hanging punctuation, so if you see that on this website, that's why. And if you don't, there's a tiny chance I fixed it.
Still, all things considered, I am quite happy, and working on this website has been a great reprieve from bombarding my brain with infosec.