RTFM

So a couple of days ago I changed the theme of my website or blog, more about the site update. Overall the new theme does everything I wanted. It’s clean and simple, along with the look and feel that I was going for. That being said there were some issues that I wanted to address, to truly make it perfect. These issues were with the site header and banner.

Firstly I didn’t want to have a logo on the page, as well I don’t want a logo and I feel that it takes away from the clean super minimal look that I’m going for. Then there is a tagline or slogan that appears below the site name, I don’t have a slogan or tagline. I’m not cool enough to have a catchphrase. The issue was that if I left that blank then the theme default was used, however, if I used an empty line, then the spacing of the site title was messed up with strange spacing. Finally, there was the favicon which was not using the one that was in my static folder, I wanted to use my little icon.

Well, I had a little bit of downtime and thought I could just knock this little task out. So I went and forked the repository and started making the changes. They are all simple changes and don’t take long.

However, the issue is that now if the maker of the original theme makes changes that make it better I have to update my forked repository, and then I have to update the submodule in my Hugo repository to point to my updated fork. Let’s be honest that process is going to fall over with all that effort.

But, there is a workaround. It’s called the documentation, and no I didn’t read it. It turns out that the theme author had placed some configuration items in the theme config that would allow me to make all my changes without having to create a new theme. The resulting changes were just a style sheet that set the visibility of the tagline and logo to none, then some padding and margin on the resulting site title. Well, that was a lot easier, which means less maintenance on my side. This just left the favicon, looked through the header source code and it was referencing sized icons, so it was just a case of duplicating the favicon with some sizes in the file name. Bosh job done.

So this is a lesson learned, well I’ve learned this lesson several times, so only time will tell if this is a lesson learned. But, generally, a good idea to go and check configuration, readme, or manual files as it can save time. I think I’m going to try and make an effort in the future to check those before just diving into the fun part of modifying code.