Frontend, JavaScript, WWW

Having used Hugo for a some years now, while creating a few dozen entries, I have discovered a few “best practices” for organizing the raw (Markdown) content.

QR codes are a two-dimensional equivalent of barcodes: a graphical encoding of information, which in practice means a string of about 4000 alpha-numeric characters (upper-case only) or a little less than 3000 arbitrary bytes.

So, how then are QR codes able to perform magic, such as automatically opening web pages, or sending text messages, or even dealing bitcoin? The answer is: they can’t.

Let’s try to understand what’s going on.

This site is generated using Hugo. Getting the site up and running was nothing short of a nightmare, which I have documented elsewhere. But things are working now, and Hugo makes adding new content very easy indeed. It therefore seems a good opportunity to reflect back and revisit the whole “Static Site Generator” a.k.a. “JamStack” topic, from a greater distance.

I just wasted one hour and five minutes, dealing with two of these opaque, unexpected, and almost undiagnosable showstopper roadblocks that Hugo will throw your way - much too often, in my opinion.

When doing research to get this website up and running, I came across the following two truly inspiring examples:

Hugo is a static site generator: it takes some plain-text content, marries it to a bunch of HTML templates, and produces a set of complete, static HTML pages that can be served by any generic, stand-alone web server. Simple.

I have compiled my various write-ups on the Hugo site generator into a single, consecutive guide.

I came across an unexpected problem when using Mathjax in a Markdown document (to be used with the Hugo site generator).

Getting Hugo to work with Mathjax (or vice versa) to create these pages took a little bit of fiddling and some trial-and-error.

Having managed to produce this site using the Hugo static site generator, it’s time to reflect and collect my impressions.