[Photo by Marina Leonova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/world-map-made-of-cork-board-on-white-wall-7634440/)

Optimizing Hugo Sitemaps to prioritize posts crawling over taxonomies

You might notice that I’ve been struggling recently with SEO and that I’ve been trying some tricks to improve it, but it feels not enough. I’ve been thinking about Google’s Crawl Budget1 and the way I could influence it to focus more on new and important content. Adding lastmod should help, but together with each new post added, Hugo generates a ton of taxonomy pages (tags, categories, etc) which also would have lastmod updated....

2024-05-17 · 3 min · timor
[Photo by Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/books-in-black-wooden-book-shelf-159711/)

Create a Virtual Bookshelf with Hugo and PaperMod

TL;DR If you don’t care about my reasoning, just jump to the description of installation and usage . Click here for a demo . I try to read at least one book each month. It’s not much, but that’s what I can afford. I read a lot of technical books, building my technical skill set, but a lot of random topics from business, psychology or fantasy. It happen to me many times that when I’ve been asked about specific book, I couldn’t remember “Where did I read it?...

2024-04-26 · 4 min · timor
[Hugo](https://gohugo.io)

Automatically setting 'lastmod' in Hugo pages with Git modification date

Following my recent SEO issues , I’m actively exploring ways to bolster my website’s ranking. One aspect I’m keen to address is expediting Search Engine indexing for pages that have been altered or updated. This is precisely the purpose of Sitemaps, a feature fully supported by Hugo1. However, there’s a limitation in how Hugo handles this by default. It sets the lastmod parameter to either the page’s creation time or the last build time....

2024-03-24 · 2 min · timor
[Ko-fi](https://more.ko-fi.com/brand-assets)

Monetize your blog with Ko-fi shortcodes for Hugo sites

Introduction Being the owner of this blog, I often find joy in revisiting past endeavors that may no longer be part of my daily work. From fine-tuning website performance to delving into the intricacies of SEO, I relish the opportunity to explore various aspects of digital craftsmanship. One aspect that particularly piques my interest is finding creative ways to monetize my blog without resorting to intrusive advertisements. As a steadfast supporter of Open Source principles, I value the ability for people to express their appreciation through voluntary contributions or tips, on their own terms....

2024-03-08 · 3 min · timor
[Cloudflare Pages](https://pages.cloudflare.com) and [Hugo](https://gohugo.io)

Optimizing Hugo static site redirects with Cloudflare Pages

I used to utilize GitHub Pages to serve static content for my blog. I secured it behind Cloudflare to employ a custom domain and automate HTTPS certificate management. Additionally, I utilized a few Page Rules to implement redirects: From www.* to non-www, From HTTP to HTTPS, And for some SEO renaming. Unfortunately, in the Free plan from Cloudflare, you are limited to: 3 Page Rules (with simple glob matching), 10 Transformation Rules (no regex rules), 10 Redirect Rules (no regex)....

2024-03-04 · 3 min · timor
[Mermaid](https://mermaid.js.org)

Adding Mermaid diagrams to Hugo

I used Chart.js charts on one of my Hugo blogs for few years already. Recently I needed to add few diagrams and I started glueing them in Chart.js but then I found that Hugo supports GoAT and Mermaid diagrams  external link . They’re not working out of the box, but it’s easy to extend. Much easier than my custom shortcodes. I tried to follow up the instruction1 but failed. After few minutes I found slightly simpler solution....

2024-02-25 · 2 min · timor
[pre-commit](https://pre-commit.com)

My pre-commit config for Hugo blog

I love blogging with Hugo  external link and I have two blogs already that use it. The good thing about static sites is that you have all the data in the files. You can optimize them locally, batch process, amend, etc. Powerful templating engine allows to quickly pre fill documents in the format I like. I have some steps in the Makefile for things like image optimization, but I often don’t remember to run them 😃...

2024-01-29 · 2 min · timor
[Generated by AI](https://www.bing.com/images/create)

Changing comments provider for my blog

I’ve been thinking about switching comments system to something different on my blog. Since I moved to Hugo  external link , I used Disqus  external link . Integration was easy and it was also easy to move comments from Wordpress. Maybe the move was easy, but people somehow didn’t like the interface. I receive 6 comments since I switched from Wordpress 3 years ago 😄 To be honest, I don’t like it too....

2023-12-26 · 2 min · timor
[Generated by AI](https://www.bing.com/images/create)

Bye Bye Wordpress!

I started my blog on custom (written by my) engine, but as I didn’t had enough time to enhance it I switched to Wordpress. I’ve been using Wordpress as an engine of my blog for past 8~9 years. I have small VPS with PHP + Nginx and you can find a lot of configuration examples from my config on this site 😄 There was a time, when I was really satisfied by what it provides....

2020-10-24 · 2 min · timor