Solar.lowtechmagazine.com now runs on Hugo

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Hi all,

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com, the version of Low-Tech Magazine which runs on a low-powered off-grid solar system has been ported to Hugo. Our previous static site generator (Pelican) didn’t cut it anymore for the size of site! Especially i18n and custom taxonomies came in really handy as well as the built-in image compression. A shoutout to the Hugo team and community for a great project and documentation resources.

You can find the files for our theme here: GitHub - lowtechmag/solar_v2: Redesign of solar.lowtechmagazine.com in Hugo engine

More details in the launch article: Rebuilding a Solar Powered Website | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

Looking forward to hear what you think of it!

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This makes me happy, as it is your site that drove me to use a SSG and make one of my own :wink: You and your site are very dear to my heart and philosophy.
I have a few comments. You complain about clunkiness of the syntax (fair enough, Jesus :laughing:) but I think you could do without some of it.

  • [Text]({{< ref “/path-to-folder” >}})

    You should integrate ref directly in the link hook, many here do that and you’ll find a few templates here in that regard. Use the power of render-hooks, they simplify writing a lot. Move all the complexity to them.

  • You don’t mention using custom attributes. Writing things like:

    ![image](/Images/dir/file.jpg)
    {. class1 .class2 any_fake_parameter=any_value}

    allows to pass any kind of parameter, and I find the syntaxt much cleaner. I think you could replace your figure shortcode easily. Not sure yet for the comment shortcode. But you could hijack a description list and style it with css, including heading inside.

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also, to the Powers that Be: Could we get methods for dithering, or a way to call external commands from templates :question:

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{{% figure src=“yutampo2.png” %}} Una borsa d’acqua calda giapponese detta yutampo, fatta di plastica rigida. Fonte: All About Japan. https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/6244/ {{% /figure %}}
You can use markdown image syntax with a renderhook.
Run markdownify on the caption to deal with the links.

![alt text](image.jpg 'your caption possibly with a markdown link [link text](https://someplace.com)'

{{- if .Title }}<figcaption>{{ .Title | markdownify }}</figcaption>{{- end }}

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Hello! I love your website and am trying to use this theme, but for some reason the images won’t appear, even though everything else seems to be working. I’ve installed Pillow and hither dither, and the images share a folder with the post, but nothing happens. Any ideas?

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Hi thanks! Are you running the python dither script (GitHub - lowtechmag/solar_v2: Redesign of solar.lowtechmagazine.com in Hugo engine) as part of your build process?

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Hmmm I thought so, but maybe I am out of my technical knowledge. I ran ‘hugo server’ in terminal and all of the posts show up in the local host test, the only thing that doesn’t work are the images.