Hugo on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I began running Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive almost exactly two years ago, with a simple goal: Create a straightforward way for Finnish language learners to access the simple news broadcast by YYYY-MM-DD. It has basically accomplished that goal, with only a few tweaks here and there to keep everything running.

Earlier in the series: Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive. I stand by those points, and have some more to add here at the 24-month mark.

Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since. A very small website, for a very specific need, just leaves a delightful aftertaste in the mouth.

Things Word has that SSGs, by and large, don't

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendations appreciated.

Disclaimer: Most of these make little sense in an Internet medium anyway.

An index. An index simply lists the terms and topics discussed in a document, along with the pages they are listed on.
A glossary. Could be as simple as a CSV file of terms and definitions, or as complex as a whole extra glossary/ folder.
Related: A “Acronyms and Abbreviations” section. Even moreso than the last, this could be a simple CSV.
A built-in site-wide search function. Word gets around this by having everything open at once.
A list of tables. Huge if you want your dead-trees books to match your shiny new website.
A list of figures. Ditto.
A list of referenced external documents. CSV! Say it with me!

The reason I compiled this list was because I decided to investigate whether I could use Hugo at work to generate our client-facing documentation. Currently we are using an unholy combination of Word and Confluence, and I figured that the magic of Git might help us keep our docs updated in a more sane way.

Cloud translation is more expensive than I thought

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Example from yesterday’s news. Count ’em yourself – there’s 76 of them there.

Mass i18n efforts like this are I think an underappreciated benefit of what static site generators like Hugo can give you. Actually, especialy Hugo – it’s multi-language support is very good, like darn near everything about the platform once you get past the initial learning curve.

Another underappreciated benefit: When building HTML pages is fast, you can afford to build a lot of them. A quick hugo && cd public/ && fd html | wc -l tells us that there are about 2700 HTML files on the site, which Hugo builds in under 3000 ms on my machine. The Github Action run which built the site as of today took a glacial 35 seconds by comparison.

Hugo's Secret RSS Feeds

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog now has a swanky new RSS feed button right on the front page, courtesy of the well-designed PaperMod theme powering things on the backend.

Hugo newbies often don’t know that Hugo usually generates these RSS feeds automatically for new websites. You usually have to go out of your way to turn them off. Example: https://andrew-quinn.me/index.xml exists, and has existed for quite some time, without me needing to lift a finger (although I might want to put a button on my home site too!).