First Post
June 19, 2024
Tags: links hugo development
Welcome to the NEW NEW HOME of Cyber Buffalo Industries
An explanation and rundown of how and why I built this site.
Hello! Welcome! I’ve been around and on the internet since the mid-nineties and I can positively say that I’ve never maintained a personal website for myself. With the inevitable collapse of social media or at least the constant commodification of our own input into those sites, it feels like if i want to be able to contribute to the internet in a meaningful way, than making a little website of my own is the only course of action.
So I’ve decided to use hugo!!! … in 2020. Through various events that website is no longer (rip). So then I created a cute little neocities site and that lasted for about a week. About a month ago (sometime around the beginning of May 2024) I had the idea of restarting the hugo site on neocities. I chose a theme, got the entire thing setup and haven’t been happy with it since. I hemmed and hawed about how and why to use it and it really never clicked with me. So I changed themes, I started new development sites, nothing really clicked. It all seemed too complicated, it all felt like more of the same web 3.0 stuff.
Then, sometime in may, I stumbled upon this blog post. This was the tutorial I had been looking for, seemingly written for me in a way that I could really comprehend. I knew what I had wanted my site to look like, more or less, and this really broke down hugo to its most basic elements. If you aren’t a very experienced coder, but want to try to develop your own theme, give this post a whirl.
After running through the 4-part post, I had a mostly functional and completely unformatted website. It was amazing. I was very tempted to keep it that way. One day maybe I’ll crawl back into the primordial ooze and call it “Netscape-Chic” but until then, this is what I’m sticking one. For the styling and CSS of the site I first started to search discmaster. If you are unfamiliar with what this is, its a big, searchable database of old software/shareware/etc cd-roms uploaded to archive.org, its fucking awesome. For the bulk of the layout I actually followed this “blog layout” tutorial from w3schools. It was pretty much the standard layout that I was looking for. Its light, responsive, was easy to implement.
Really the last thing that I needed was a way to display galleries. I have been shooting more film recently and wanted a way to upload and share film scans with friends and family. I looked around and decided to use hugo shortcode gallery. HSG is a “theme component” which means you call it in your hugo.toml (or whatever config file you’re using) in the theme section. It was actually really straightforward to implement and renders extremely fast. So far, no complaints.
A big thanks to my fellow cyberbrother rappy for being an absolute whiz at CSS and helping me some of the more modern parts of website maintenance. He’s a freelance designer and an absolute ease to work with. I literally could not have finished this thing without him.
What I plan to do with this is reach for sky! Of course I would love to get in the groove of being able to update and tweak this site regularly but who knows. Will this be another neocities experiment lost and abandoned? Or will i blog about Fringe and the X-Files? Perhaps I’ll finally dig through my camera collection and at least log what i’ve got, do reviews, post images, give analogue film photography advice. For now, I’m just glad this site is mostly working, and I hope that if you find this from some frustrating google search that, if it makes it way to you through all the images of generative-AI babies being paraded out in front of armies made out of hot-dogs, that it will inspire you to make your own website. And possibly invite me to your webring. I love that webrings are coming back.