Making a website: home on the web

Webcraft
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hugo new

I know the shape of the hugo project I’m building. Let’s see which parts I’ll need, repo by repo:

  • a config repo - to hold the site settings, and pull in everything via modules.
  • base theme - this will be tule, and I only need it to get started; later I’ll pull in additional theme-y components via modules.
  • content - this will potentially many repos, but to start I need a single section: maiki

That’s it! Well, to get started.

Everyone gets a section!

In Hugo a section is a logical division of content, and a lot of info can be inferred from how a section is organized. For this site I want to emulate the idea behind tilde user directories. I’ll have one, and I can put all the maiki-specific stuff into my one repo, and it will live in my section of the site. This one-to-one mapping makes it easy to add more folks to the site, and provides an easily understandable restraint: if you publish information to this site, it will live in this place and in this way.

So I’ll create a repo that is just some text files. I haven’t loaded content via modules yet, so I’m not sure how to best format the file layout. Do I put them all in the root, include LICENSE and README, and map that to content/maiki? I think that will work, maybe with a little config tweaking.

tule as a theme

I named my tiny CSS file tule, so I’d have an easy-to-understand-for-maiki reset that told most browsers to do the thing I care about.

The idea isn’t to create a robust framework that does a bunch of stuff for me. Rather, it captures my “philosophy” of decent defaults for knowledge sharing.

Currently it is:

main {
    max-width: 70ch;
    margin: 0 auto;
    padding: 0 2vmin;
    font-family: sans-serif;
    font-size: 1.5rem;
}

h1 {
    font-size: 2rem;
}

I’m still developing exactly what I want this to become. Maybe create my own sense of separation of structure and design… at any rate, it is fine to publish now (it’s what I use on maiki.xyz). But I do need to make it an actual component/theme/module/thing. :grimacing:

A config by any other name

With modules, a “code” hugo repo has gotten kinda weird. It can basically be a single config (I think), which can provide hugo with enough instruction to pull in data and templating information and deploy a built site. Wow!

I intend to use a media server type computer at my home to deploy the site, and probably have it build once a day or week; I’m in no hurry. That means a cron job on that computer will do three things:

  1. Pull down any changes to the config repo
  2. Run hugo, which pulls down everything else and builds the site
  3. Upload changes to server

Hugo can utilize external apps for certain deployment types, but I don’t know how I’ll upload files at this point.

Next step is to create these repos, one at a time, and discover the many ways to structure home on the web. :slight_smile: