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LoveIt

Evgeny Kuznetsov Evgeny Kuznetsov wrote in site meta
   3 minutes to read 

I’ve been adjusting the site to my own tastes since I “moved”. I’m liking Hugo more and more1, but I started to dislike the way my site looks. At one point the need for a new “theme” became obvious.

Hugo themes are some kind of template sets2. In theory, you could have your site’s contents in a separate directory and plug any theme in (and tweak it as required with a pair of lines in a config file). In practice you only get the seamless theme switching if you customize nothing; as soon as you have any real customization, you’ll need to re-adjust all your customization to that new theme. I’ve been customizing the hyde-hyde theme I’ve chosen initially quite actively, first for IndieWeb compatibility, and then it was hard to stop. As a matter of fact, I got most of my simple technical “wantings” implemented, and I was mostly ready to start implementing complex ones, but… I liked the way my website looked less and less each day.

I must say I’m not much of a designer (or a visual person at all, for that matter), so adjusting the looks of the site the way I’ve adjusted the technical details would be quite impossible for me. Instead, having accustomed myself with Hugo a little, I was morally prepared to hack into a more complex theme, adapting its good bells to my needs and throwing the unnecessary whistles out. I only needed a theme for a basis, but I had no time to properly dive into Hugo’s theme collection, and nothing quite stood out the couple of times I scrolled through it… And then all of a sudden I bumped into LoveIt on a site I visited.

Of course, I had to modify it to quite some extent, it took me almost a week3 to simply get what I already had working on the site working. Quite a lot of various imperfections still remain, so I have things to do in my spare time for foreseeable future. But, all in all, it’s a victory, the revamping is done. It now has a dark mode, a builtin search (that doesn’t work in the English version of the site just yet), and a lot of features I haven’t yet used but plan to.

Nice.

  1. Well, as much “more” as possible. I was totally fond of it on day one already. ↩︎

  2. Some kind of, since some of them can only be called “template sets” to the extent Emacs can be called a “text editor”. ↩︎

  3. Granted, I had to give lectures, teach classes, create various documents, not even mentioning living a life in general. But it really took quite some time, and almost a whole Saturday, too. ↩︎

 hugo