Going Public: The turmoil of publishing a project
I published the Hugo theme I built my blog with this morning. Early this morning. Late at night, really, if you think of it as I do―I hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so it was still the same day. It’s been open & available to anyone who cared to read it this whole time, of course; the CSS is served up freely, fresh and hot to any comers, and the HTML is right there. All of it’s in one obvious place, but it’s somehow different from being put up in a repo on github. Up to this point―even with the code available for all to see―the mechanism by which this was assembled into coherent documents was still a veiled object, concealed in my private archives. To set it out is to change my relationship with the theme, fundamentally.
In opening up a project to others to access its inner workings, you create a space and opportunity for criticism: positive or negative; wanted or not. That commentary or critique can help the project grow and adapt, but it still involves setting aside some amount of ego and control. In this case, I can choose to circumscribe the space for commentary: limit who can be involved, or else leave it as expansive as allowing all comers. Either option comes with a form of risk, the same one we take on every time we get involved in public projects. As much as I tell myself I don’t care or mind, the truth remains that I do―because I’m human, because I respond so readily to the question of “is it okay that this may get judged harshly?”
This is hardly a momentous project to unveil, but it is, ultimately, an indication of my craft that I’m giving to others, as others provided previously for me. In the landscape of Hugo themes and site structures, I hope to present a literate HTML approach to site design, and in so doing, present my own skill. It’s hardly done, just done enough for my uses. There’s definitely points of extension: a palette mechanism to override the color scheme of the site, for instance. Just because I like the appearance of my blog’s colors doesn’t mean other people won’t have widely varied tastes, nor should this require a fork for what is so straightforward a concept.
AAdmittedly my knee-jerk concern has definitely been buffered by the positive responses I’ve gotten (and the original request that spurred me to actually part out my theme), being clear, but that initial frisson of concern about rejection was strong. Not enough to stop me; just enough to get me to pause, rethink, recheck, and adjust several times. I definitely posted to Mastodon too early about it―gotta have a demo site up, for instance―but I’ll keep that in mind for next time.
Today was an interesting excursion into GitHub Actions and Pages and the not super clear steps to set it up; if I’d known about the local runner, that probably would have helped a lot for testing. The default workflow had a lot of extra stuff that just didn’t make sense for me (no need for SASS or NPM), so clearing that out about halved deployment time. In all, an easy to use system that performs well and makes presenting a theme truly simple.
This is all a long way to say: Meet inTUItive, available at ben-zen/hugo-in-tui-tive.