Experiments with Hugo on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:45:00 +0000

I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, I decided to build my own theme from scratch with Claude Code. The theme is called Typeset.

Why build a custom theme?

The short answer: I got tired of fighting someone else’s decisions. Every borrowed theme comes with assumptions about what a blog is and what it should look like. Eventually those assumptions start getting in the way.

Building a standalone RSS-to-Mastodon bridge

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:21:52 -0600

I’ve been working to minimize hosting requirements and to reduce external dependencies for my website. I now have simple, lightweight, self-hosted search and commenting functionality. The only external dependency remaining was the way new posts were cross-published to Mastodon.

I’d been using the excellent Mastofeed service. Mastofeed works great! If you’re looking for a hosted (free!) solution, definitely check it out. You authorize it to post items to a Mastodon account, and it automatically toots whenever you publish something on a website by checking the RSS feed for new items. Easy peasy. But it’s an external dependency - it could disappear, or change, or start inserting ads or something, or who knows?

Building my own custom standalone comments app

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:23:14 -0600

Surely, one day, eventually, I will write a blog post that isn’t about vibecoding some bauble into existence and actually get back to something deeper. I think learning how vibecoding (and coaxing some form of LLM to do stuff in general) is an important thing to understand, not just read about. I’m absolutely not an AI Evangelist, but this work has changed my perception of LLMs and agentic tools as they (rapidly, so rapidly) increase in capacity. This is not that day.

Building a custom SQLite search engine for my Hugo site

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:56:36 -0600

Cogdog Shoutout

Following Levine’s Law: Start with the demo!

This post talks about how the new custom search engine for my website was built (original announcement from almost a week ago). The search tool is at https://darcynorman.net/search and the source code is available on Github if you want to check it out before/while/after you read this…

developing a custom hugo theme with claude

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:09:22 +0000

I’ve been using a customized theme based on the great Beautiful Hugo theme for Hugo for a few years now. It’s worked well, and I’d made a lot of adjustments to make it do what I wanted. But it never felt like “mine” and I’d always meant to take the time to build my own. So, Which was likely never going to happen, so a week and a half ago I thought I’d try building one with Claude:

Publishing an OPML Blogroll With Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 19:02:32 -0600

Hugo is the static site generating content management system that I use to publish this website. It works really well, and has some deep functionality that I’m not even touching. For instance, it can parse data files while generating the site - including JSON and XML - and can use the content of those files to display information on web pages.

I was going to follow some recipes that I found online, but they involved converting the OPML file into JSON to be read by Hugo. I didn’t want to do that if possible. So, time to roll my own solution using built-in functionality in Hugo…

Self Hosted Searching in Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 16:38:14 -0600

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s site-specific search as a way to make this site searchable, after moving from WordPress to Hugo. Since static websites don’t have a database, searching is more difficult so I’d let that go and had just used an embedded search form that fired off a DuckDuckGo query.

Which worked. Mostly. But it also got results from other subdomains at *.darcynorman.net, and didn’t sort them too well. So it was not as useful as the WordPress Relevanssi search plugin had been.

Hugo Screencast Demo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 13:49:20 -0700

Some people¹ have asked me how Hugo works for publishing my site. It’s working great for my needs, and although it still needs some command-line work, it’s simple enough to learn it.

Combining Section Feeds and Filtering the Homepage in Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:42:22 -0700

I’ve been setting up my website, and had things working pretty much exactly how I want them. But, I’d been struggling with how to properly separate content on the website while combining content in the main site feed. The main reason is to be able to have things like /reflections to separate week-in-review reflection posts without overwhelming the homepage with weekly posts that would make all other content that I post on less than a weekly cadence be lost in the noise.

On moving my blog to Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 12:01:38 -0700

After finally deciding to throw caution to the wind and move my webstuff back into a static format, this website finally landed on Hugo. I did an initial migration from WordPress to Jekyll, which looked really promising but took waaaaay too long to generate the 2,800+ posts for this site (taking almost 45 minutes?). Hugo runs as a native application, and runs MUCH faster. Generating the entire site currently takes less than 5 seconds, then uploading it to the server via rsync takes only a little longer.

Moving my blog to Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 20:32:38 -0700

After many, many, many years running my blog on WordPress, I finally got tired of fussing around with convincing it to do what I want it to do, and trying to get it to perform well enough to not have to wait 20 seconds for page loads. I’m also wanting to shift away from hoarding all of my content online.

I had been experimenting with Jekyll, but it was so unbelievably slow to generate the static HTML for this site that I had to give up on it. I’m now running on Hugo. It’s a native binary application that runs on my laptop, so generation is really fast. It took less than 4 seconds to generate the full website for all 2,818 posts for this blog!