[ post ] Why I am making my own theme

Very rambly, but hey ho.

Author: CodingCellist

content/en/post/creating-my-own-hugo-theme/index.md

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+---
+# Documentation: https://docs.hugoblox.com/managing-content/
+
+title: "Creating My Own Hugo Theme"
+subtitle: ""
+summary: ""
+authors: [thomas-e-hansen]
+tags: [hugo,website,gardening,meta]
+categories: [sapling]
+date: 2025-05-08
+lastmod:
+featured: false
+draft: false
+
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+# To use, add an image named `featured.jpg/png` to your page's folder.
+# Focal points: Smart, Center, TopLeft, Top, TopRight, Left, Right, BottomLeft, Bottom, BottomRight.
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+  focal_point: ""
+  preview_only: false
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+---
+
+When I originally set up this website during the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to
+use the "Academic" theme from Hugo Blox (or ~~Wowchemy~~ Hugo Academic, as it
+was known back then). It was a tiny bit of a pain to get self-hosted, rather
+than through their solutions via Netlify, but it was manageable and I loved the
+colour themes, the multi-language support (because I vastly overestimated my
+amount of free time), and that the themes were both desktop- and
+mobile-friendly. However, a consistent pattern with Hugo Blox -- other constantly
+changing the org's name, don't know what's up with that -- has been that
+updating the theme to its latest version is a chore.
+
+"But surely you don't need to update the theme? If it ain't broke, don't fix
+it." -- I mean, you're not wrong. But Hugo still seems to be moving quite fast,
+so occasionally things break, and then I'd like my site to build again. And
+also, I think not updating my website's theme just also goes against whatever
+same ~~masochistic~~ naturally curious tendencies that have me running a rolling
+distro as my daily driver; for better and for worse, I like being on the
+bleeding edge.
+
+And that is kind of the crux of it: I'm not annoyed that things break between
+updates, that can happen for even the best software, no I'm annoyed that every
+time the site theme breaks, it breaks:
+* in a new way, which depends on Hugo, or the theme, or both;
+* the structure of the theme, changing what specific directories for different
+    content types are called;
+* the theme itself, completely removing colours or features which the theme
+    itself originally used.
+
+If it were just that the theme needed patching every time, that would be fine.
+But having an effectively novel code base to learn every update is incredibly
+tiresome, and I want out. As I said at the start of this post, I'm already going
+against the intended use of the theme by self-hosting it, Geo Cushen -- the
+creator behind ~~Hugo Academic~~ ~~Wowchemy~~ Hugo Blox -- seems to be running
+it in a SaaS direction, with self-hosting being possible thanks to the whole
+thing being open source (which is _amazingly generous_ by the way) but not
+officially being supported (the documentation for doing so is sparse and usually
+a bit behind the current version). Which is _completely fair_, the guy needs to
+make a living, nobody is forcing him to make _several_, in my opinion, great
+Hugo themes, much less to open-source theme. I am very grateful for the use I've
+gotten out of this, but I'm not interested in running my own site via a
+third-party, zero-code solution, and that is the primary focus of Hugo Blox. So,
+fair cop, I will have to move to something else.
+
+By far the easiest option would be to find another theme, but I've had a look at
+other themes, and none of them really match what I want my website to be: my own
+little place on the Internet to put and manage my thoughts, projects, pictures,
+whatever, without any algorithm or data mining overlords baked in. Some themes
+are too minimalist or quirky, or they are effectively a web-CV. The former,
+whilst I appreciate the aesthetic, are a bit too far removed from
+"useable/intelligible to the everyday person" for my tastes; and similarly, I
+get why people want the latter, but in my book that's what LinkedIn and, y'know,
+my actual PDF-format CV are for.
+
+So the only option seems to be to write my own. This way, I get something which
+(hopefully) looks how I would like it to, and where _I_ know the codebase,
+meaning I can (again, hopefully) figure out what broke, why, and how to fix it.
+Regardless of update-mania. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to work
+and be understandable by me (although I'm going to put it on GitHub, in case
+anyone else wants to use it). Up-to-date tutorials for how to create a Hugo
+theme seem few and far between, a downside of Hugo still being a relatively new
+static site generator, but both
+[Tomo's "Create a Hugo Theme From Scratch"](https://tomo.dev/en/posts/create-hugo-theme-from-scratch/part-one/)
+and
+[MayADevBe's "How to create a Hugo Theme"](https://mayadevbe.me/posts/blog/hugothemecreation/)
+seem recent enough that things have hopefully not changed drastically.
+
+Let's see how it goes!
+
+-----
+
+As always, thank you so much for reading! I hope this more rambly post was
+interesting in some way or another. And if you're reading this, given that my
+blog currently doesn't build at all, I guess I was successful! I intend to keep
+maintaining and polishing the theme over time, so maybe you're viewing this and
+it looks awful, or maybe the site has finally become the lush paradise I wanted
+it to be. Can't wait to see for myself either way, I'm sure it'll be fun and
+I'll learn something new  : )
+