Many static site generators are coming up these days; 175 and still counting. Apart from the prime selling point of content creation from the comfort of your favourite text editor in Markdown, most have a wide gamut of themes to choose from. You are free to remix the theme to your taste however you see fit. Want to change the line spacing and paragraph alignment? Sure thing! Don’t like anything? Ditch them all and whip up something new. Share it with others, perhaps? You do not have to be a web programmer or designer to customize themes; I am a C++ programmer but I had no trouble picking up CSS3; just a few days of tussling did the trick.

You get these advantages in most SSG’s but Hugo has one more: it has no dependencies from an end-user viewpoint; download and extract it on any machine, and get down to stuff that matters — content. I think it gets this by virtue of being authored in Go.

This is a test page I tried to check out Hugo; to verify its fitness as a technical blog generator that supports the following sorely-needed scenarios for this web log.

Text Formatting

• Formatting
  • bold
  • italics
  • code snippets
  • strikeout
  • blockquotes
  • custom font
  • line spacing
• Footnotes
• Unicode, UTF8 and emoticons support
• Math equations
• Tables
• SVG render with captions
• Interactive Demos with HTML5 Canvas

Blockquote and Footnote

This is an obscure alternative to the famous “The quick brown fox…” pangram¹

Exploring the zoo, we saw every kangaroo jump and quite a few carried babies.

Unicode, UTF8 and Special Characters

பிறந்த குழந்தைகட்கு இந்த பாடலைப் பாடிக்காட்டுவது வழ்க்கம்:

அம்மா இங்கே வா! வா!
ஆசை முத்தம் தா! தா!
இலையில் சோறு போட்டு
ஈயை தூர ஓட்டு!
உன்னைப் போன்று நல்லார்
ஊரில் யாவர் உள்ளார்?
என்னால் உனக்குத் தொல்லை
ஏதும் இங்கே இல்லை!
ஐயம் இன்றி சொல்வேன்
ஒற்றுமை என்றும் பலமாம்!
ஓதும் செயலே நலமாம்!
ஔவை சொன்ன மொழியாம்!
அஃதே எமக்கு வழியாம்!

ஏனெனில் இப்பாடலில் அனைத்து உயிரெழுத்துக்களும் ஒவ்வொரு அடியின் தொடக்கத்திலும் இடம் பெரும்.

-- gives an EN DASH (–), while --- is an EM DASH (—). Fractions, like 9/22, are beautifully rendered too 😃

Code

This C++ code is syntax highlighted. It also has a particular line highlighted; this line prints hello, world! on the terminal:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "hello, world!\n";
}

Math Equation

Perhaps this

$$ e^{i\pi}+1=0 $$

equation is more beautiful than the highly over-rated $E = mc^2$. They are rendered here with MathJax which is supported by Hugo elegantly.

Table

A table with different alignments:

Vector Graphics

Let’s see how an SVG shows up with an accompanying caption!

Interactive Demo

Red is the viewer here; green dots are end points of walls. Click and drag one of them to see where the vision ray from the viewer can go past the walls.

An external HTML document, containing JavaScript, is embedded in an iframe here.