Start of my blog

This was my initial question, when I started to inform about static side builders like Hugo (no not the similar sounding cocktail Hugo that is mostly known in the German-speaking area), Hexo or even blogging platforms like WordPress. Most of my time as a software developer, besides coding, I’m searching for solutions for my day-to-day problems at work with the search engine of my choice. First I will receive entries from StackOverflow, which are mostly fine and give me a good entry point for further research, but if I need more deep insights, I will land at blogs from some MVPs¹. These deep insights are of course more beneficial for understanding more about the issue and how to solve it in a efficient and sustainable way.

Every time I see these blogs, I’m also questioning myself, if I could also provide value for others like these blogs? The honest answer is probably: Maybe not, but I thought: Who cares?. So I spent half a day to set up and get up running this blog with some tools:

• Hugo as static site generator
• Congo as starter theme for my blog
• TailwindCSS, which comes together with congo

What are awaiting me on this blog? #

Since I’m working as a software developer in the energy industry and also have studied computer science, I will write more about technical stuff - mostly about .NET, Open Source and generic IT stuff. Maybe I will also post about some non IT related stuff, especially about games. First, I must get into this blogging thing and sort out what works best for this blog. Do not get mad if the content of this blog changes very often.

How the hack does this works now? #

Installing Hugo and Go, the underlying programming language for Hugo, was quite easy. Here are the steps:

1. Download & install Git if you not already have.
2. Download & install Go
3. Download & install Hugo

After these steps, you can now use Hugo for creating static websites. To create a new site and run it locally on your machine, you must enter the following commands:

hugo new site name-of-your-website
cd name-of-your-website
hugo server

You can now look at your website mostly under localhost:1313, but it will look very naked. To give your website some look, you can choose one of many production-ready themes from https://themes.gohugo.io/. I decided to go with the congo theme provided by James Panther, which looks amazingly good and is easy to use.

How can I use this congo theme? #

If you want to use also the congo theme, you can look at its docs or follow me quick through my adventure with congo.

1. First you need to set up a Hugo project as described above in the chapter How the hack does this work?.

2. If you accomplished this, you can now install the theme by using Hugo:

   # If you\'re managing your project on GitHub
   hugo mod init github.com/<username>/<repo-name>
   
   # If you\'re managing your project locally
   hugo mod init my-project
   

3. Next, you are adding the theme to your configuration by creating a new file with the name module.toml inside your Hugo project directory under the path config\_default and add the following content to it:

   [[imports]]
   path = "github.com/jpanther/congo/v2"
   

4. Now you can run your server by typing hugo server at the command line. With this, the theme will be automatically downloaded.

5. View your website under localhost:1313.

6. Set up the configuration files for the theme by downloading a copy from GitHub. After you have successfully downloaded the zip file, you extract it to a location of your choice on your computer and copy the containing files to the themes/congo/config/_default folder located in your Hugo project directory.

Looks good, what’s next? #

Phew… that was hard work, nah? Now what can I do with it?, you will ask yourself. Well, you can now start to personalize your website by following the guide from James Panther and start your first post.

Happy blogging! :)