Migrating to the Rusty Typewriter Theme
As you can see, Everything is Oll Korrect! has a new look. When I migrated from WordPress to Hugo in early 2024, I went with the Mainroad theme because it was good enough and didn’t require much configuration. I had enough on my hands with the migration, and didn’t want to spend a lot of time finagling with the theme. Mainroad had the basic layout I wanted, most of the features, and looked decent, if a bit plain.
Now that it’s been a couple years, though, and I’m back in the habit of writing regularly, I decided that now was the time to look around to see if there was something better. One of the very few advantages WordPress has over Hugo is the rich assortment of themes to choose from, even if you’re limited to free themes. After looking at literally every theme that Hugo indexes on the official site, I settled on Rusty Typewriter. It has the same basic layout I like, with a more interesting colour scheme and a few extra features I can use. I appreciate that the site search doesn’t go through Google anymore, and having a word count on each post is nice. It can also display related posts on each article, which is something I missed from my old WP theme.
Installing a theme in Hugo is pretty easy, especially when you don’t have any customisations to worry about, as I didn’t. However, I found myself changing around more than I anticipated. I added a blog subtitle, moved post tags from the top of the post to the bottom, added links to the next and previous posts, changed to a custom font (the same one used on my static site), and tweaked spacing in several areas. For instance, image captions were weirdly far below the image so that it wasn’t clear it was even a caption, so I moved it closer and italicised it.
There’s still more I would like to improve, of varying levels of ambition. Changing the categories list so that it’s sorted alphabetically instead of based on frequency and removing the hashtag symbol, for example, or adding a calendar of some kind to make it easier to browse the blog chronologically. Currently, related posts are determined by overlapping tags and categories, but I’d like to find a way that’s more robust. I noticed that this theme adds breadcrumbs above each post, but currently the only subdirectory any posts are in is “2026.” I could make this more useful by moving all the other articles into a folder, one for each year, which is something I’ve been wanting to do anyway if only so I can navigate my own backlog more easily. The downside, of course, is that doing so would break any incoming links or bookmarks, which I already did in 2024. The solution would be adding redirects, but with a few hundred posts, that is a lot of redirects.
After doing all these customisations, though, I feel like I’ve become much more aware of how Hugo themes are built, and since I’ve already done a lot of customisation to Rusty Typewriter anyway, I’m considering just forking it and building my own theme on top of it. With my blog, I prefer to focus just on writing as much as possible; I spend enough time staring at code at work and don’t want to do more of that at home. However, my needs aren’t terribly complex, and Rusty Typewriter gets me most of the way to my goal. Besides, once I’ve finished, it should be mostly done and not something I’d have to continually maintain.
This should, theoretically, be made all the more doable as I’ve become more comfortable working with an AI assistant. Most of my experimentation in this field has been at work. At Everything, so far, I’ve only used Claude for proofreading (absolutely no writing; only checking for spelling and grammatical errors). In working on the theme migration and customisations, it sped things up considerably. I still don’t entirely trust it, and only applied changes I completely understood, but nothing I’m doing here is terribly complicated anyway. Theme editing in Hugo is relatively simple by design.
For now, I’m uploading what I have and will likely make more small changes in the near future. A fork would likely be more of a year-end project.
In any case, I have a more regular post drafted and in need only of some final editing. It will likely go up in about a week.
As always, thank you for reading.