Site Updates

Website Changes #

I have made several changes to my site. I decided it was time for a cleanup and a refresh of these pages. I was several versions behind on Hugo (my static site generator) and also several versions behind on the theme I was using. I have not been posting regularly, but I have plans to change that in 2026. So this is the first post of the new era with a brand new look & feel.

New version of Hugo #

I use Hugo as my site generator. It is an application, writen in Go, that will generate a static website from a collection of markdown files. Upgrading has also forced me to become more familiar with the concept of page bundles and how Hugo uses them. I find it extremely easy to use, very fast, and has all of the features that I need. I will include a link to the Hugo website at the bottom of this article.

New Theme for Hugo #

I had been using the Bilberry-Hugo-Theme for several years. It is a great theme and served me well. With the update to my base Hugo setup, I decided I wanted to try something new, and generate an updated look and experience for the site. For this effort I went with the Congo theme. It maintained a color scheme I am comfortable with and gave me some new options to try. So far I am really liking the new theme. It was a bit of work to convert the old files to the way Congo expects them, but the effort was well worth it. The changes were mostly in organization and how frontmatter works, so it was not difficult, just minor editing to each file and how I store them in directories. This has been a good learning experience as I have become more familiar with how Hugo and Congo work together to utilize the files I create.

New Image Gallery Code #

Changing themes has required me to build my image galleries differently. The Bilberry-Hugo-Theme had some built in code for decent image galleries. It was relatively easy to use, but most of the syntax was handled in frontmatter and a bit messy. It worked really well and I was happy with it.

The Congo theme has some really cool features around using icons, emoticons, and figures (images within posts). However, there is no buit-in method for handling galleries. In this context, a gallery is a collection of images usually displayed in a grid, and provides a form of lightbox for clicking on an image and seeing it at full size. Congo’s figure shortcode is really cool and can be used in conjunction with markdown (even tables) to build a grid, but no additional functionality.

The Congo developer has provided a suggestion and a link to a separate Github project that is a Hugo module add-in providing gallery functionality. The name of the project is hugo-shortcode-gallery. It is super easy to implement and it renders beautifully. I have re-built my current three galleries to utilize this shortcode. I am very impressed with this code and will create a few more galleries in the future. One of the really cool features the hugo-shortcode-gallery project provides is action buttons so the user can switch galleries (collections of different image groups) with the click of a button. I am not using this feature yet, but I plan to implement it in the future.

Commenting on Posts #

I have been using the commenting framework Utterances for my site. This framework uses Github to store and manage comments. The drawback is that this requires a user to have a Github account before they can write a comment. Since I am not a professional blogger, or even a high-volume poster, I am content to use Github and keep this as simple and cost-free as possible. Other than my own comments, I only had one user leave a comment in the last 3 years. I like providing a comment feature, but it is not critical or necessary for my site.

My previous theme provided built-in support for Utterances in addition to several other commenting platforms. Congo does not provide direct support for Utterances, but does alow me to build my own code snippets to accomodate. I am reviewing Hugo documentation, and Utterances documentation to add this back in later. For now, I have turned comments off. I will post in the future when I turn the feature back on.

Links to software in use #

Hugo - Static Generator
Congo - Hugo Theme
Hugo-Shortcode-Generator