How this site is built
The setup is carried over from the personal blog this site replaced. It has worked without attention since 2024, which is the best thing a blog’s plumbing can do.
- Plain Markdown in a git repository. Each post is one file. The history of the site is the repository’s history.
- Hugo with the hugo-bearblog theme, which follows Bear Blog: pages of a few kilobytes, no scripts, no tracking.
- The theme is a git submodule, so it can be updated or pinned without copying its files into this repository.
- Netlify builds and serves the site whenever the repository changes. There is no server to look after.
The one thing that did not work
Netlify’s Hugo quickstart template would not build with this theme, whatever was tried. What worked was starting from nothing: an empty repository, a new Hugo site inside it, the theme added as a submodule, and the theme’s example content copied in as a starting point. Netlify built that on the first push.