So I Made My Own Hugo Theme Kinda

So I did exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do - I went and created yet another Hugo theme. Classic.

I’d been using Smigle for a while, which is honestly a great little theme. But it was starting to drive me nuts having all these features I didn’t need, and my CSS override file was getting ridiculous. I kept thinking “why am I fighting this so hard when I could just remove the stuff I don’t want?”

Particularly annoying was that reading time feature - I mean, who actually needs to know a post is a “3 minute read”? Not me, and not my readers (which, let’s be real, is probably just me anyway).

Since the original Smigle is hosted on GitLab and I live primarily in GitHub-land, I ended up creating my stripped-down version there. I’ve obviously kept all the proper license acknowledgments and links back to the original - I’m not a monster! If you’re curious, my much more minimal fork is now living at GitHub.

Mainly what I did was just… delete stuff. I’ve never been a “more features = better” kind of person. I reworked the footer to properly credit the original theme while making it clear this is a different variant. And I tore out basically anything I considered unnecessary fluff.

Am I a frontend developer now? God, I hope not. But at least my blog looks exactly how I want it to!