Renga: A Clean Bootstrap 4 Theme for Hugo and Blogdown

Nan Xiao November 10, 2018 1 min read

For a long time, I have been maintaining my homepage and the portfolio pages (software, papers) with HTML purely written by hand. Skeleton was my frontend framework for about five years, then I switched to Bootstrap 4 this year.

After I (re)-started blogging at the end of last year, things got a bit complicated. The blog and the portfolio pages don’t get a consistent look (the blog looks cooler…). What’s worse, they are maintained separately: one was generated by software automatically, and the other one was painfully updated by hand. Things have to change.

Today, I can finally announce that I have proudly gone full blogdown! Right now, all the pages on the surface of this website are entirely generated by blogdown. The migration and merging of the two sources took about 24 hours.

To make the transition easier, I built a new Hugo/blogdown theme that allows me to write HTML to use Bootstrap 4 components for specific pages, and write Markdown for the less complicated pages, such as the blog. This theme is named as Renga (連歌, linked poem). See more screenshots in its GitHub repo. Here is a live preview site.

Figure: A screenshot of the Renga theme.

OK, now we have both Tanka and Renga, I’m wondering how Haiku looks. Stay tuned folks.