Hugo

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. Taxonomy pages might catch some traffic eventually, but nowadays they’re mostly useful for humans, when they’re looking for similar content. Search engines rather forward people directly to the content. ...

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?” or “What was the book title?”. Some day I accidentally passed through Dave’s Rupert blog and his Bookshelf  external link and I loved it! I have a blog, so great place to collect and share, with easy access from anywhere - why not to use it? ...

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. What I aim to achieve is a clear separation between creation and modification dates. This would signal to Search Engines to focus on scrutinizing only the “changed” posts, expediting their reevaluation—an approach commonplace in the Wordpress realm but more intricate with Hugo. ...

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. This is where platforms like Ko-fi come into play. ...

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). I made use of a combination of these rules, but due to these limitations, I couldn’t meet all of my requirements. I have few hundreds of broken URLs reported by Google Web Console. Google still remembers that I migrated from Wordpress and attempts to index some paths I no longer host. Although I attempted to utilize Hugo’s aliases 1, it only facilitates 1-to-1 matching. I’m unable to address this issue within these constraints. ...

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 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 😃 ...

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. ...

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. Not only because of features, but also beacause I was able to play with insane configuration options (check out my caching reverse proxy config ). For me it was opportuninty to excel with my skills. ...