So, I was messing around with this thing called Hugo, trying to build a simple website. And I thought, why not try adding a cool theme? That’s where “hugo-hat” came in. Let me tell you, it wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be, but hey, that’s part of the fun, right?
Getting Started
First things first, I already had Hugo installed. If you don’t, you gotta go grab it. It’s pretty straightforward, just follow the instructions on their website.
Next, I created a new Hugo site. Just typed in some command like `hugo new site my-awesome-website` in the terminal. Boom! New website skeleton, ready to go.
The Theme Struggle
Now for the “hat” part. I found this theme, hugo-hat, and it looked pretty neat. I decided to go the submodule route. Seemed like the “right” way to do it. So, in my website’s folder, I did something like:
-
git init(To make my website a git repository, you know, for version control and all that). -
git submodule add themes/hugo-hat(This is where I got the theme into my project).
I opened up my `*` file (or maybe it was `*`, I always forget which one Hugo uses by default) and added a line saying `theme = “hugo-hat”`. Figured that would do it.
Tweaks and Headaches
I ran `hugo server` to see my masterpiece in action. And… it looked kinda broken. The styling wasn’t quite right. Turns out, I needed to copy some example content from the theme’s folder to my website’s folder. Specifically, I grabbed the `content` and maybe the `static` folder. After some more tinkering, it went on!
After copying that stuff over and restarting the server, things started to look much better. The theme was actually working!
Customization Fun
Of course, I couldn’t just leave it as is. I started poking around in the `*` file, changing the title, adding my own name, playing with the colors. It was actually pretty intuitive. The theme had good documentation (thank goodness!), so I could figure out what most of the settings did.
I then started writing my own content in Markdown files inside the `content` folder. Hugo uses Markdown, which is super easy to learn. It’s basically just plain text with some simple formatting tricks.
Deployment (The Easy Part… Eventually)
Once I had a few posts written and the site looking decent, I decided to put it online. Used some service, and it was surprisingly simple. I just pointed it to my Git repository, and it handled all the building and deploying automatically. It was much more complicated at first, but I figured it out eventually.
So yeah, that’s my little adventure with Hugo and the hugo-hat theme. It wasn’t perfect, there were some bumps along the way, but I got a working website out of it, and I learned a ton. Definitely recommend giving it a shot if you’re looking to build a simple blog or personal site.
