Will It Cost Anything?

For a personal Hugo blog — no. Cloudflare Pages has a genuinely free tier that covers everything this site needs:

No credit card required. A Hugo blog typically deploys in under a minute and produces a few hundred files at most. You’d have to be doing something unusual to hit any of those limits.

This site is built with Hugo — a static site generator written in Go. Everything is plain files: markdown for content, TOML for config, HTML templates for layout. There’s no database, no CMS, no server-side code. Hugo reads your files and builds a static site you can deploy anywhere.

This post covers how to do the most common tasks yourself.

How the Site is Structured

blog/
├── hugo.toml               # Site configuration
├── content/                # All your pages and posts
│   ├── _index.md           # Homepage content and layout
│   ├── about.md            # About page
│   ├── gallery.md          # Gallery page
│   ├── engineering/        # Engineering section
│   │   ├── _index.md       # Section landing page
│   │   └── *.md            # Individual posts
│   └── posts/              # Blog posts
│       ├── _index.md       # Section landing page
│       └── *.md            # Individual posts
├── layouts/                # Custom templates (override the theme)
│   ├── home.html           # Homepage layout
│   ├── _default/
│   │   └── gallery.html    # Gallery page layout
│   └── _partials/
│       ├── site-header.html  # Banner/header override
│       └── site-footer.html  # Footer with social links
├── static/
│   ├── images/             # Images used in pages/banners
│   ├── css/
│   │   ├── custom.css      # Global CSS tweaks
│   │   └── lightbox.css    # Gallery lightbox styles
│   └── js/                 # Custom JavaScript
└── themes/ananke/          # The base theme (don't edit this directly)

The theme handles all the base styling and navigation. The layouts/ folder in the root is where you override or extend it — anything you put here takes priority over the theme.