Hugo

I wanted to add comments to this Hugo blog, so I searched for “best Hugo comment plugin.” The results were surprisingly thin. I found a Hugo forum discussion from 2023 and a Reddit thread from 2022, but no obvious answer. Both discussions offered long lists of names, and several of the services have changed, stalled or disappeared since then. I already had some experience with the most obvious answer. I used Disqus on madebynathan.com for years, then it started placing ads above the embedded comments widget. I did not want someone else’s advertising inserted between an article and its discussion, so I removed Disqus and replaced it with giscus. ...

At the start of this project, ~/code/actually_random was an empty directory. I had bought ActuallyRandom.com, but there was no Hugo site, no theme, no GitHub repository and no DNS configuration. I opened Claude Code and described what I wanted. Roughly ten minutes of active agent work later, actuallyrandom.com was serving a Hugo blog over HTTPS. It had a theme, search, archives, RSS, Google Analytics and an automatic GitHub Pages deployment on every push to main. ...