Hugoloop, a super-minimal starter site

I make at least 2 sites a month, most of them are static and written in plain HTML and CSS as much as possible. In fact, a few of my minisites (like map.joodaloop.com are just a single HTML file written by hand. I really like keeping things as simple as they can be.

But I always run into the following annoyances as soon as more than one page is involved:

• Any shared components (like navigation bars and footers) need to to be manually duplicated across pages manually.
• I would often forget to update the <meta> tags (page title, social media cards) for each page to the correct values.
• How does one add an RSS feed? By hand??
• After one too many <p> tags I would start to miss the ability to write in Markdown.
• I’d have to go find a CSS reset and typography stylesheet from one of my previous projects.

I’ve been told this is the moment when people turn to the dark side, and write their own static site generator — one that finally has the perfect, simple feature set and intuitive syntax. Luckily for all of us, I decided to double down on the site generator I already use: Hugo

So I put together Hugoloop, a starter that uses the simplest possible site structure for a Hugo site, and contains all the things mentioned in the list above. And everything that one might need is linked to in the README. To quote it’s introduction:

…the amount of Hugo-specific detail you need to understand is kept to a minimum. Your experience should feel as close to “edit some HTML, write some Markdown” as possible.