How This Mess Started
So yesterday I needed a place to dump my coding notes. Googled stuff about fast blogs. People kept yelling “HUGO HUGO HUGO” everywhere. Thought, fine, let’s try this thing.
First thing: install Hugo. Went straight to terminal. Typed brew install hugo like some tutorial said. Hit Enter. Boom. Error messages about permissions. Cursed silently. Reran with sudo like some desperate hacker – sudo brew install hugo. This time it worked. Small win.
Getting Everything Ready
Made a folder on my desktop called OfferHugoHell. Moved into that folder in terminal. Typed hugo new site my-blog. Command ran. Folder appeared, super basic, almost empty. Felt disappointed already.
- Realized it needed a theme. Went theme hunting. Got overwhelmed. Like a kid lost in candy store.
- Chose “Paper” theme randomly because screenshot looked clean.
- Added theme as submodule. Copied commands blindly from theme website. Prayed.
Then created first post: hugo new posts/*. File popped up inside content/posts folder. Opened it. Saw empty spaces needing words. Panic moment.
Stuff Smashing Into Walls
Tried firing up dev server with hugo server -D. Command started running. Saw scary warnings about missing theme files. Browser showed blank page. Felt stupid. Realized forgot to copy config files from theme folder. Duplicated theme example config into root folder. Renamed to . Killed server. Started again.
Browser reload. Pure horror – ugly unstyled text everywhere. Cursed Hugo’s ancestors. Checked theme documentation again. Needed to set theme name right inside *. Added one line: theme = “paper”. Saved. Server auto-refreshed. Page suddenly… looked human. Could have cried.
Finally wrote actual words in that * file. Put garbage like “Hello testing page plz work.” Hugo ignored it completely. Remembered front matter matters. Added draft: false under the title. Saved. Boom. Words appeared live.
Why This Is Actually Good (Maybe)
Took whole morning just seeing words on screen without errors. Felt like moving mountains. Looked at my * file now:
- baseURL = “whatever”
- title = “My Broken Thoughts”
- theme = “paper”
- ugly other settings
Real strength? Building actual site. Typed hugo alone. Whole site exploded into public folder instantly. HTML files sitting there ready. Not slow like other junk tools. Pure speed.
Thought it was overcomplicated for showing words online? Yeah. But no database crap to manage. Just folder of markdown files. Updates? Edit text. Rebuild? Hugo smashes HTML fast.
Won’t use it for every tiny thing. Need to build theme properly? Template language made my brain itch. But dumping daily notes fast? Maybe Hugo ain’t so bad.
