I think this is the 4th or 5th iteration of my website.

Goals

1. Able to write the website in markdown, within [[Obsidian]].
2. Being able to push updates simply/automatically from Linux.
   1. Include auto-generated index pages.
   2. Alternative links for lots of pages, so they sit at a slash-page (like /intake, /feed, /links, etc)
3. Small / lightweight user interface. Ref:
   1. https://macwright.com/2016/05/03/the-featherweight-website
   2. https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/tiny_websites_are_great
   3. SVG for graphics, if needed
   4. Test with https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and https://www.webpagetest.org/
4. A place to host my small apps

Contents

• Home
  • Projects
    • Including list of ideas for things I haven’t actually done
  • Blog
    • Individual posts
  • Intake
  • Shelf
  • Nope
  • Resume
  • Apps (not in the header)
    • Perpetual game
    • Fermi game
  • RSS

Plan

Pipeline

Hugo seems to do everything needed, so it will just link directly to an Obsidian subfolder.

Aliases will be handled via Obsidian front-matter:

aliases:
 - /intake
 - /in

Content probably needs YAML headers also for:

• lastmod (maybe :fileModTime)
• created

Sync can be a script like:

cd (folder)
hugo --minify
rsync -avz --delete public/ myserver:/var/www/jwbatey.com/

Use a list.html template to add an index for each folder (projects, blog, maybe shelf)

Site design

To keep the page load under 15 kb, the templates should have:

• No webfonts.
• Inline/minimal CSS via a stlye tag in the head
• js - probably none needed

Templates:

• shell.html - header, navigation, footer, css, js (if any) - 4kb limit
• content.html - the body of the page - <11 kb goal (~2000 words)
• list.html - for the auto-gen folder indexes

Images - Nope. Inline SVG if needed.

Setup Steps

• Setup hugo

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
HUGO_VERSION="0.xxx.0" # Lookup latest version manually
wget -qO- "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.tar.gz" \ 
 | tar xz -C ~/.local/bin hugo
hugo version

• Build templates above. Ended up with:
  • hugo.toml - Config file. Site setup, menu list, also configs RSS
  • baseof.html - base page
  • single.html - filters so ‘updated’ date only shows if modified since created
  • list.html - every _index.md gets an auto-generated chronological index
  • index.html - Shows most recent edits
• Point content/ at Obsidian folder
• setup hugo.toml to generate the RSS
• write a 3-line rsync script for Hugo
  • Extra lines to copy app folders as-is

To fix

• md links - does jwbatey need them? If not, filter out the Obsidian style links. Might need a build step.
• Switch the website to a Things style dark color scheme, assuming low enough kb. ✅ 2026-03-11
• Figure out if the triple-single-quote is working because of Firefox themes or what ✅ 2026-03-11 (Working due to Hugo)
• Fix RSS feed to use modifed date if created is blank. Right now it seems to default to 0001-01-01
• Add a copy button (if space allows) to the triple-single-quote ✅ 2026-03-11
• Setup aliases in nginx

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri/ =404;
}