New Theme for July 2020

I decided to switch Hugo themes, from Kiera to Mainroad. I wanted a theme with a sidebar and more options to tweak.

I had a lot of trouble installing the new theme, as there was a bug which turned out to be due to Netlify having a known issue with Hugo themes. It took me quite a while to find out the cause, which this overly chirpy Netlify Support Engineer summarized as follows:

Q: Why isn’t my Hugo theme working correctly with Netlify? A: We get this question often. Luckily, there is both a common root cause for this issue and a solution for it! Most often, Hugo themes added using git clone will not work with netlify. This is the common root cause I mentioned. So, what is the solution, you ask? Use the git submodule command instead!

The Mainroad page did give me the Command Line instruction to use, but it was another example of the many little frustrations you run into when getting up to speed in the JAMstack world.

Anyway, next step is to start adding my own design touches (such as they are) to this new theme. I’ll do that over the coming weeks.