Which developer does not know this situation: you debug like a mad person and form all sorts of crazy theories my the code in front of you does not work. Especially if you are new to a topic — like we are with our shiny new Hugo blog.

When I created the blog, I intended to keep the directory structure identical to the old WordPress blog:

<domain>/<year>/<month>/<day>/<post>

All good and well, until I updated to a different theme, because the minimal theme by Calin Tataru that I originally chose — and which I still find stunningly beautiful in its clean simplicity — is apparently not maintained anymore. At least the last commit dates four years back.

But this story was not supposed to be about the challenges of supply chain management. That’s a whole different story.

It’s about your thoughts going in circles and ending up in a cargo cult¹. I had all sorts of crazy theories, why we only get the year 2018 in the index with the new theme. I even hypothesized that a kind of hidden cache in Hugo held pre-built pages.

Turns out, I couldn’t have been more off. Christoph, whom I called for help debugged the current template and found out that Hugo has a concept of main sections. And 2018 simply got auto-picked because it had the most entries.

So here’s the fix:

1. Put your posts under the top level directory posts

   <domain>/posts/<year>/<month>/<day>/<post>
   

2. List it in the configuration

   params:
     mainSections: ['posts']
   

Big thanks to Christoph for saving my sanity.