Blog Housekeeping

 Posted on May 23, 2024

Finally, finally getting around to some essential housekeeping of my literate blogging tools.

My blogging platform consists of Emacs org-mode, Hugo and a theme that started out as Beautiful Hugo. I first set up and started using this tool chain in 2018 and, while I have migrated to newer versions of Hugo, I haven't really done much maintenance along the way.

chroma: fix a bug in the raku lexer
go-org: honour noweb parameters

Hugo has dependencies on go-org and chroma and I rely on both of them for literate blogging using Emacs org-mode. I have been carrying a couple of patches for these dependencies in my private forks because I have been too lazy to push them upstream. The theme also uses features that have been deprecated so some theme maintenance is overdue.

My blog was also relying on symlinks to pull in content from my AoC repo and the latest Hugo no longer supports that. I need to migrate to using Hugo's overlay mounts module.

Taking stock of what needs addressed, I came up with this to-do list:

  • Push go-org and chroma patches upstream
  • Migrate to latest hugo with updated dependencies
  • Clean up warnings in my theme
  • Upgrade fontawesome to get newer icons
  • Add a mastodon social media link

Updating Hugo

I am upgrading Hugo to the latest version in git which is roughly v0.126.1, with local replacements for chroma and go-org. With symlinks no longer supported, this configuration is neeeded to add my advent of code content from a sibling repository.

module:
  mounts:
    - source: content
      target: content
    - source: ../advent-of-code/2020
      target: content/post/advent/2020
    - source: ../advent-of-code/2022
      target: content/post/advent/2022
    - source: ../advent-of-code/2023
      target: content/post/advent/2023

Cleaning up the Theme

The theme originated from Beautiful Hugo, but there has been a steady stream of tweaks over the years. More recently I have been hacking a few things out of it and adding slightly bigger enhancements. I'd say it's now diverged enough that I don't want to rebase it onto the most recent version of Beautiful Hugo.

There are some deprecated properties which has resulted in several minor updates across the whole theme. The most significant of these was migrating author settings to params.author.

Font Awesome and Mastodon

I want to add a mastodon social media link but the icon is missing from fontawesome 4.x. That requires an update to a more recent fontawesome version. Sadly the project seems to be pushing anti-patterns to try and encourage conversions to Pro accounts. The 'kit embed codes' seem to be about tracking and monthly usage caps and I can't be having that crap. Thankfully there's still a download option so I can add the resources to the project instead of using a CDN.

With fontawesome upgraded to version 6.x I was able to add a shiny new mastodon link, which you can find in the footer below.

hugo  literate  org  raku