In late May 2026, I migrated this blog from Hugo’s Cayman theme to PaperMod. The migration gave the site a cleaner layout and a better foundation for features such as search, archives, and tags.

This post captures the small, repeatable workflow I use to create content, preview it locally, and publish it.

Create and preview a post

  1. Change directory to your local blog’s Git repository root.

  2. Hugo is self-contained on Windows. Once the folder containing hugo.exe has been added to your Windows PATH, you can run the site directly from its Git repository.

    hugo server -D

  3. Create a new page or modify an existing page in the /content/post folder. The file naming convention is YYYY-MM-DD-post-title.md. A post begins with front matter such as:

    ---
title: "A useful post title"
date: 2026-08-27
tags: [software]
draft: true
---

    Keeping draft: true makes it possible to preview the post locally without publishing it.

  4. Start the local server, including draft posts:

    hugo server -D

    Open the address shown in the terminal, usually http://localhost:1313/.

Publish the post

When the post is ready, change draft: true to draft: false. Then commit and push the changes to GitHub. A GitHub Action in my repository builds the site and publishes it automatically.

References

I followed the PaperMod documentation basics during the migration. The PaperMod theme page and theme documentation are useful references when extending the site.