So yeah, let’s talk about messing with Hugo Duarte. Not some fancy deep dive or anything, just me trying to get this site setup working ’cause I heard it was slick. Figured I’d jot down what actually happened, step by messy step.
Started with the Dumb Stuff
First thing? Had to get Hugo running on my machine. Easy enough, right? Wrong. Headed over to the official Hugo site – don’t need to tell you how, you know where it is – grabbed the installer. Ran it. Boom. Nothing. Terminal just stared back blankly like I’d insulted its mother. Tried typing hugo version. Got back a bunch of gibberish about commands not found. Great start. Had to google how to fix the PATH thing. Absolute nightmare fiddling with system settings. Finally got it to cough up a version number. Progress.
The Theme Headache
Okay, Hugo’s running. Time to make a new site. Slammed out:
hugo new site my-cool-blog
Got a barebones folder. Felt like an empty warehouse. Needed furniture, decorations – a theme. Saw this “Duarte” theme mentioned somewhere. Supposed to be minimal, clean. Found it online. Downloaded the zipped theme folder, plopped it into the themes directory inside my site folder. Felt hopeful.
Edited the * file like the theme docs mumbled about:
baseURL = "/"
theme = "hugo-duarte"
Thought that was it. Ran hugo server. Opened the local page. Still that ugly default placeholder. Refreshed. Cached? Hard refreshed. Nada. Empty screen. Might as well have stuck with the warehouse. Checked the console. Errors about something called Params not being defined. Googled it. Apparently needed more junk in the *. Added lines for title and theme params. Still nothing. Tore half my hair out before realizing the theme folder inside “themes” needed to be named exactly “hugo-duarte”. Mine wasn’t. Renamed it. Hit reload.
Finally. Text on the screen. Looked kinda plain, but it was there. Minor victory.
Adding Crap and Breaking It
Right, time to add my first post. Hugo’s command for that:
hugo new posts/*
Found the markdown file in content/posts. Opened it. Draft: true. Good. Filled it with nonsense about starting this blog. Simple header stuff:
title: My First Post
date: YYYY-MM-DD
Then actual words underneath. Saved it.
Hugo server was still running. Saw it rebuild. Went back to the site. New post… not showing. Where’s the damn list? The theme needed a list layout. Started digging into the theme’s layout files. Found layouts/_default/*. Looked complicated. Copy-pasted the example from some other Hugo theme’s list page into mine. Changed a few references to “posts”. Saved. Reloaded.
Kaboom. Whole site dead. White screen. Terminal yelling about unexpected this, unexpected that, missing partials. Classic. Undid my changes in *. Site came back. Life lesson: don’t paste random code from other themes without coffee.
Hunted through the Duarte theme’s own files again. Found an empty posts directory inside layouts. Copied a list template example from Hugo’s official docs into layouts/posts/*. Tuned it slightly. Saved. Held breath. Reloaded. Post titles appeared! Clicking on one showed my nonsense post. Looked… basic. But functional. Good enough.
Where I Ended Up
So after way longer than it should have taken:
- Got Hugo running eventually.
- Beat the theme into submission.
- Can throw markdown files into content/posts.
- The server picks them up.
- The homepage lists them.
Does it look amazing? Nah. It’s plain text on a white background. But it’s mine. It’s working. Why bother? Because setting this stuff up yourself, hitting those walls, and finding a way over (or just walking around them), that’s the real learning. Now I need to mess with styling, figure out navigation… that’s future me’s problem. Today’s me? Happy enough the thing didn’t explode. Small wins.
