Quickstart confusing to an old-timer

Installed Hugo on my Mac using “brew install hugo”, then walked through the quickstart tutorial. Everything seemed to go exactly as expected, until “Add Content.” I pasted in the markup to “My First Post” as instructed. Then it says “Save the file, then start Hugo’s development server to view the site. You can run either of the following commands to include draft content.”

It doesn’t say anything about how I’m supposed to see this new page I just made. If I’d been more clueless, I probably would have just run it again, and found that the home page had included this “post” material. (Why is it doing that?) But I’m not clueless, and there hadn’t been any mention of new pages somehow being embedded in the old pages, so I pointed my browser at http://localhost:1313/posts to try to find the page in question.

And that worked. Sort of. There’s a page there, but the actual text isn’t getting the markdown formatting applied to it.

While writing this message, I discovered what I was supposed to do was go back to http://localhost:1313/, where that content appears with “My First Post” being a link and the “Read More” button visible. However, the embedded version on the home page still isn’t applying the “bold” or “emphasized” characteristics to the text. If, however, I follow the link to /posts/my-first-post, THEN I’m seeing all the Markdown formatting.

So: a question, and a suggestion. The question is, am I supposed to not be seeing the markdown formatting applied to the home-page-embedded version of My First Post?

The suggestion is to add a brief description of the expected results of some of the material. For example: “View your site at the URL displayed in your terminal to see your new content. Keep the development server running as you continue to add and change content, because [??? does Hugo monitor all its directories and regenerates stuff when it changes? Why am I being told to keep the development server running?]”

I will note that in the “Configure the site” section, the instructions say “Start Hugo’s development server to see your changes, remembering to include draft content.” That little addition telling me WHY I’m starting the development server is exactly what would have helped me in the previous section. In fact, except for that one section I mention, the Quickstart is extremely well done.

If I understand correctly, the reason you’re not seeing markdown formatting on either the home page or the /posts page is because your theme is displaying the Summary of the post (that’s why there’s a Read More) link.

The .Summary function strips some (maybe all??) HTML formatting and just displays the text.