Sweat the Small Things

Today, I had an issue with my Hugo and PaperMod powered blog. Hugo and PaperMod are the only 2 dependencies in my blog and I figured I’d pull them up. I started with pulling up PaperMod, but had issues with minimum version. I thought I was on a new enough version of Hugo (0.138 from my recollection) on Windows, but the pushed site still did not render properly on Vercel.

I switched over to my Mac, ran nix flake update and my site built and rendered properly on Vercel again. OK! Now I’m up and running again!

I noticed that my blogs’s favicon was not showing up on Vercel and at the webpage. What gives? I had to do a bit of searching thinking Hugo was the problem, but it turns out PaperMod’s pathing relies on it being in a static/ path to be defined in the config.yml. This discussion is eventually what led me to the right answer to fix my file paths and there’s also a good FAQ answer.

That said, this also led me to Jesse Wei’s blog about how he switched from Hugo/PaperMod to Jekyll/al-folio. Jesse also pointed out the problems of PaperMod and how many missing features there are. PaperModX attempts to address these lack of features, but it does not get much maintenance due to the author of PaperModX’s commitments to other projects. This leaves PaperMod(X) users fragmented. Unfortunately, I am stuck between which to use and I want my core job here to be blogging, not how to maintain my blog’s codebase. I switched from a self-built platform so that I could be free of that and rely on libraries maintained by others.

I think through all my previous thoughts about blogs and how I interact with them, I want to try playing around with more static site generators. I should diversify what off-the-shelf SSG I use. The next question though is how interoperable are my markdown files between the different SSGs? How much will I have to modify the frontmatter of each Markdown file to make it work? I guess that’s the next thing to sweat over.

So what is the moral of the story? Well, it was that at each step of the way I learned a little. Sure, I was stressed trying to find the answer to each question that came up, but at the end of it, I grew just a little bit. I also used this blog post to reflect on it.