Web App Tools

This was a nice simple side project inspired by a task I did as part of a hackathon organising team. I was to create a list of technologies that hackers could use in creating their hack, and so this expands on this idea.

The way I used Hugo for this project was different to how Hugo websites are usually built, in that most of the content is in the frontmatter. I could have used markdown tables instead, but I got greater control by programatically producing the table using data from the frontmatter. For example, this makes it easy to hide a column, and also allows me to add a full width cell at the bottom.

The headers were created in the following way:

{{ if .Params.properties.description }}
<th class="px-4 py-2 ">Description</th>
{{ end }}

This means that they will only show up if .properties.description is set in the frontmatter

Then the cells were created like this:

{{ if $.Params.properties.size }}
<td class="px-4 py-2 font-medium text-center">{{ .size }}</td>
{{ end }}

This will only create the cell if .properties.size is set, and if size isn’t available for the individual piece of technology then hugo will just leave it empty, rather than throwing an error. This means that I don’t need to do an additional check for if size exists. Note that I have a dollar sign in the first conditional as this is within a loop, so the dollar allows me to access the global scope.

I could just repeat this for all the pages and they would be created.

Then on the homepage, I needed to use range and where to fetch a list of the categories like this:

{{ range where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "categories" }}
<li class="py-2">
  <a class="hover:font-medium" href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">
    <p>{{ .Title }}</p>
  </a>
</li>
{{ end }}