Technical Difficulties: Updating Site RSS ... or Attempting

I manage this site and several of my others using Hugo, a static site generator based on the “Go” language. I’ve learned a little bit about Hugo themes over time, not as much as I used to know about Wordpress, but enough to whip up a few mini site themes from scratch and heavily modify the academic theme I use on this one.

A little knowledge is, of course, dangerous. As I posted on the 15th, I’ve added a quilt module to the site. These publish to the main RSS as well as their own local RSS (thanks Trip K. for suggesting I put the main RSS link in the nav bar). But the metadata fields I’d built to describe the quilts weren’t showing up in the RSS feeds.

I spent a couple days playing with the RSS feed to pull in the params and then to actually style them. This seems to be at least partly working. Some RSS readers where I’ve tested the new feed style it great, some don’t, and I can’t figure out why.

I hope that if you’re already enough of a charming nerd to be using an RSS reader, you’ll be a little forgiving if the layout isn’t quite perfect.

But what really messed things up, leading to some localhost errors and a complete re-dump of my RSS that may have flooded your readers, was a small error I made when generating the site.

To generate a hugo site, you just need to run hugo in the main directory. It rebuilds the /public folder that you upload to your server. You can also run hugo -D to publish your drafts as well as your published stuff. I sometimes do that. And then you run hugo server to test. Running hugo server doesn’t just fire up a mini server at localhost:1313, it also generates a public version of your site with localhost:1313 instead of your domain name and runs constant partial updates on both as you update code (you can add a flag to have it fully rebuild each time).

I am not 100% sure what I was doing, but I wonder if perhaps I ran hugo and then followed it with hugo server … basically, generating a static site and THEN thinking “oh, I should double check something” and THEN uploading without regenerating it again. It’s just one of my hypotheses. I can’t easily review the order in which I typed those two commands, since I used them a ton over the last two days.

What fixed it tonight was saying “let’s start from scratch,” and deleting the whole public directory. Regenerating with hugo gave me exactly what I expected all along. It took 5 minutes to fix instead of the hour I booked. I still managed to use up the hour, mostly writing this.

So whether it was me or the hugo directory that needed a reset, I think things are mostly fixed now. More quilts in the next few days!

Now, let me run hugo server to preview this post…