The site you’re now reading was built with smigle, a publicly shared blog theme I created from scratch for the Hugo static site generator. If you’re dissastified with Hugo’s official collection of themes (currently it contains 403 themes) and want a blog that exactly meets your needs, I recommend building your own theme. It’s a short, straight-forward process, and my hope is that from reading about my experience building smigle, which took only one two-week sprint, you’ll decide to build your own theme too.

Although the Hugo docs include many valuable topics guides, they don’t offer a readable, beginner’s track. In this post, I describe why this track is needed, what it ought to contain, and how much of it can be sourced from existing doc pages.

When building smigle, the Hugo theme for this site, I was looping over an array and outputting both the current element and some delimiter text, but I couldn’t figure out how to handle the last element differently from the rest so as to avoid the unwanted trailing delimiter. In this post, I cover the solutions I found for this delimiter issue. Hopefully, this short read saves you from the misery I went through while hunting for advice on Stack Overflow and Discourse.