I’m not very good at throwing old stuff away. On the Internet, storage space is nearly infinite (in comparison to my brain). So i rather archive than delete. I’m like a squirrel in that way. Thus, i decided that i wanted to keep my old Now posts, to turn the Now section into something akin to a blog. How easy i though it was.

This site is built on Hugo, a static web site generator. You can publish most any kind of static site with Hugo, most notably documentation sites and blogs. Hugo relies on Themes, which are fairly complicated beasts that turn your Markdown text files into glorious and organised web pages.

I use a fairly popular theme called Ananke.

One basic assumption about Ananke pages, and Hugo pages in general, is that it can be of a given class; a “leaf” page like a blog post (like this one!) or a Branch page, which is a kind of an index page to a section. Typically, in Ananke fashion, your blog would be presented as a Branch page, based on a list template, from where you can navigate to any article or Leaf, generated using a single template.

Well, that’s not how i wanted my Now page. Thinking of it, it’s not really how i want my Blog either, but lacking the competence to change it, i’ve learned to live with it. Silly me. But i wanted the Now page to display the latest post, like it were a Leaf page, with the possibility to navigate to earlier Now posts. Preferably with a little menu on the side for earlier posts, and with another box quickly explaining what this Now thing is. For that, i needed to rewrite the whole list template, and it’s still not quite right (including the fact that while i like the layout more than the current single layout).

This was oddly reminiscent of toying with web pages at the turn of the century. Uh, wait. Thirty years back. (Oh goodness) It was possible for me to copy and paste stuff from the single template, experiment around, read the Tachyons documentation and watch the results. One really nifty thing Hugo comes with is a local server with instant live updates on the client side. You start hugo serve on your computer and watch the magic happen on http://localhost:1313, with navigation and everything working like a miracle. The only thing i had to do to get it to work with the theme was to git submodule update --init themes/ananke, even though i had the submodule configured from before (on another computer, if that’s of any relevance). Anyway, seeing live results, and the occasional error messages, makes it feel like i’m a coder :D