About This Site

I want to create a living journal of some of the decisions I made to customize this site that could potentially help others looking to build something similar. This post will be updated every time I make a substantial change. Hopefully in the future, this will be my own version of the Way Back Machine.

May 17, 2021

Increasing the font-size has been a bit of a pain. Unfortunately, the creator used a mix of absolute and relative font sizing in the CSS. So while some fonts scale up after changing the main font from size 14 -> size 16, others remained small. It took a bit of time to go through and update.

I’ve also changed the color of the theme from green (#2bbc8a) to blue (#1b71b3). A bit easier on the eyes. One of the frustrating parts of Hugo is that in order to make permanent changes to the look and feel, you have to upload a custom.css file to the ‘static’ folder. Otherwise if you just change it in the theme css document, your changes will be lost when the theme author makes updates. So I had to find all 26 instances where the color green (#2bbc8a) was used and replace them in the custom css. It’s just a one time change, but still required some tedious manual work.

May 7, 2021

We’re Live!

This is what the site looks like at launch. I have a ton of things on my to-do list of cosmetic changes, but I still need to figure out how to make these changes with Hugo. As you can see, I’m keeping some of the sample posts on here for now just to imagine what it’d look like with more content.

Some things on the to-do list include: updating theme colors, font, and the cactus image. I also want to add some css to add a darker border to images and the description.

It has taken a surprisingly long time to even get to this stage. This was my first time launching a site with Hugo (or any other static site generator), first time using github, and first time using command line. I also had some hiccups with the custom site + Hugo + DNS settings.

Hugo has been relatively easy to build locally, but launching it has been quite a pain. Everything looked great on the local server (sidenote: I love that functionality), but uploading everything to github, creating a submodule with command line for the public folder, and updating settings to use a custom domain has been challenging. It’s good practice though - I’m sure the next site I launch will be faster.