Hugo is as nice a static site generator as they come. But it has its disadvantages, eg. if you want to customize your site in ways the hugo developers haven’t anticipated.

On this page I’ll collect the quirks and hoops I had to discover or jump through to make this website work the way it does. I’ll also have a list of things that don’t work right now, so if you know something I don’t feel free to point me at the solution by emailing me at michael@ the domain name of this site (no spambots, that’s why I don’t write the full email address).

Solutions

Matomo

We all know Google Analytics are evil, despite Google’s motto. So here comes a self-hosted solution, Matomo (earlier known as Piwik). I run my own Matomo instance, and I control the privacy (that is, I don’t collect privacy-related data like Google does), and I’d like to share what the few easy steps are so you can do the same. But that should be on another page, with links and pictures.

Letsencrypt

I am using Letsencrypt certificates, the free kind, on my webserver, and I have a setup which renews the certificates whenever renewal is needed. Without me doing anything. That is how certificate management should work, and if you disagree, you definitely have too much time on your hands.

Problems

• I want an optional picture for each webpage, and that picture should be minified to say a 32px circle (other formats should also be possible) for the listing page.
• I want a “newest” section on the front page, maybe three or six article links with the picture as the background and the title as the link text. In a 3x1 or 3x2 grid.
• ads just don’t work. Tried adsterra (but don’t support their idea of “popunder” ads, that’s just plain evil). Don’t really want to use google, because of the - in very many cases well-founded - privacy accusations, at least in Europe, where I live. I don’t want to go to court just because my ads provider is stalking people looking at my website.
• right now my template is a bit bland. Could have liked a “top line” with a blue-to-green gradient and just a simple title in white on that. Have mockups in graphics format and HTML, but haven’t found the right place to modify my template yet.
• my build script is VERY basic right now. Well, it works, but… would like a full staging environment (first local, then staging on the server, then in production - and I’d like a git workflow to go with that).
• the way this list is just growing I should probably move this to issues in my bugtracker :)
• that about page is… horrible.