Hugo --cleanDestinationDir and Git Submodules

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 16:20:39 -0400

Recently I’ve been working on updating my blog a bit (you might have noticed?). I keep the hugo sources in a git repository and the built site in a separate repository. That repository is added as a submodule to the sources repo and during the build, the generated HTML is written into the submodule. Except the submodule kept getting messed up; git would be unable to track the changes or they’d be added to the parent repository. It was truly maddening, but as it is so often, the problem was not git but me.

A New Theme

Mon, 21 May 2018 22:58:40 -0400

After toying around with the really nice Temple theme I decided there was no better way to spend my afternoon than building my own, new theme for my blog.

If you haven’t notice, I recently switched my blog from Jekyll to Hugo. The upgrade path from the really old version of Jekyll to the latest version wasn’t quite working as expected, and having to mess around with Gemfiles isn’t really something I enjoy. Hugo on the other hand is written in Go and comes as a single, standalone binary. That seemed really appealing and I’ve had good experiences when trying to build a little photo gallery builder with it a while ago before Hugo had actual photo support. Moving the content over from the Jekyll frontmatter to the Hugo frontmatter was done easy enough, I even moved some of the good posts from my really old blog on here. I was almost perfectly happy, exception for the theme. The Temple theme is nice, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted. So this weekend I built my own (yeah, you’re looking at it).

Hugo on ilikeorangutans

Hugo --cleanDestinationDir and Git Submodules

A New Theme