I found Hugo in 2017 and since then I have used it to build a lot of web sites. Building sites with Hugo is fun! For customer sites where an editor need to keep the site updated I early on started to use Forestry.

Last year I built a number of Hugo sites that takes the content from Notion and Airtable via their respective API. It works really well. Users manage the data in Notion or Airtable and the sites are kept updated in the background automatically.

One of the big advantages with static sites are that you can host them almost anywhere. I have found that GitHub pages is one of the most convenient hosting solutions. With the help of GitHub actions the deployment process can be completely automated.

Hugo Pipes was added in version 0.46 and give Hugo the possibility to process sass and postcss files as well as fingerprint, minify and concat asset files. My own Zen theme for Hugo have used Gulp to process sass and js but now I have updated it to make use of pipes.

I have made my small company site multilingual, in Swedish and in English. It’s a static site built with Hugo and my own Zen theme for Hugo. Hugo has good multilingual support. What took the most time was building a language selector that works both when content is translated and when it is not.

My article Running Drupal on Debian 8 with Apache 2.4, event MPM and PHP-FPM (via socks and proxy) is one of the most read on xdeb.org. Here is the updated version for Debian 9. I mention Drupal in the title but this setup should work well for most PHP based systems like Wordpress and Joomla etc.

I have released the css grid version of my Zen theme for Hugo. This site have been using it for a couple of month. Read more at Layout with CSS grid and flex, it’s really nice. With the resent release of Microsoft Edge 16 there is support for css grid in all the major browsers.

This site is now using CSS grid layout and it’s a real pleasure to work with. This is part of the Zen Hugo theme and you find the code at frjo/hugo-theme-zen at grid. CSS grid is supported in resent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Setting out to create a simple contact form turned out to involve more work than I anticipated. I need it for one of my new static sites. The examples I found was to old, lacking spam protection and/or relied on multiple/large libraries.

Hugo introduced custom output formats in version 0.20 and here I will be using it to generate two different JSON outputs for my site. First a search index that can be used with various search solutions. Second a JSON Feed, a new alternative for RSS feeds.