When The Defaults Are Wrong - hugo edition

First up a shout out to Abel Wang

Abel Wang, was one of many of the tech industry, sadly no longer with us, who rightly pushed the #DontAcceptTheDefaults movement as plenty of times the defaults don’t take into account accessibility A11y and in more cases than not are plain stoopid

Sadly at the time of writing this, previous short-link aka.ms/Build2022/ForAbel where you could get the T-Shirt or other merch that was available from Bonfire.com seems to be no longer available.

I did find it on https://podhalastore.com/product/dont-accept-the-defaults-abel-wang-shirt/ but I don’t know if this site actually has been granted permission to stock it.

The Stoopid Defaults this time around - hugo edition

These are some that I have added for different reasons

# this is needed for the site to allow Underlines which use standard html tags as for reasons people don't see the point in underlined text for emphasis - Read [🔗 Adding Underlining by Extending Markdown Flavours aka Where art thou dear underlines? - blog.kilasuit.org 🔗](https://blog.kilasuit.org/2025/11/04/adding-underlining-by-extending-markdown-flavours/)
# blame web devs (maybe american ones, maybe not) for misunderstanding the difference between a hyperlink and underlined text 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️
markup:
  goldmark:
    renderer:
      unsafe: true

I regularly will test things using a fully-disconnected environment - like when I’ve struggled and lost internet access due to not having the money to pay my bill on time, which is more common than I’d like to admit.

# fix for when offline 
# ERROR
# timed out initializing value. You may have a circular loop in a shortcode, or your site may have resources that take longer to build than the `timeout` limit in your Hugo config file.
timeout: 60000

# added when have no internet because of the twitter issue
# ERROR 2025/06/11 01:47:09 Failed to get JSON resource "https://publish.twitter.com/oembed?
## also why was this in site params above
ignoreErrors: 
  - "error-remote-getjson"

The above allowed me to Just F***kin Get On With It

disablePathToLower: true

This enables in my site for tags to have CapitalLetters in them

This is what my site looks like without them - note the Series & Tags sections

Whilst I’ve actually stopped using the category taxonomy this is also how it would look without

Now have a look at the these sections (I default hide these if you are on smaller screens) however most mobile browsers should have a Open in Desktop view setting - I only use Firefox for my browsing as I can’t stand chrome based browsers at all. #SorryNotSorry

I also add these (though these should be defaults)

link_tooltip: true # enable the social link tooltip, options: true, false

params:
   since: 2015

This adds the following in the site copywrite

 postCount:
    enable: true
    wordcount: true #
    min2read: true # read time 

This makes the wordcount render on page build as well as the Time to Read, which for posts like mine this is pretty important as it

The overall Post metadata that I intend to show will also in future include

• Time published
• When was updated
• How Many updates since 1st Publish
• The Authors of the post

I also will extend this with both requiredCoffees: & recommendedCoffees: elements that shows how many I needed in writing posts as well as how many I may recommend you have whilst reading

I likely will also add additional elements on my posts & backend data in future these that will be auto-generated with certain actions - like a custom run-on-save action that I will actually build fully independent of VSCode using Events

timeTakenToPublish: whoknows # this will be getable via TimeTracker in future.
looBreaksNeeded: 
timeGivenToPublish: 20 minutes hours
fileSavesBeforeCommit: 10 #Auto this in future from the vscode timeline or just commit on each save.
fileSavesBeforeFirstPush:
commitsBeforePublishDraft:
commitsBeforePublishLive:

So that you and I & others can see and work out how quickly a post materialised & mostly because I like the idea of tracking some interesting but useless stats like this & hope that they aren’t abused & gamified to see how reguarly people are doing the save->build->localdeploy->commit->push->remoteBuild->remoteDeploy process to say I did 10000 productions deploys over the course of a 3 month period of a Tier 1 critical service that my team relied on which is all well and good but this don’t mean nought for teams of 1 with no downstream customers 😜 & is just tech bro wankspeak that everyday people don’t care about.

However, it’d also be quite awesome to embed on the page the Interaction Graph for the file, both the FileSaved one that VSCode must be using under the hood for the TimeLine pane (which everyone should know about and use) & the gitCommit ones that shows how regularly it was updated in the git history - that is a git extraction and would be a hidden in a collapsible section by default if I ever were to publish that as part of the build & publish of mysites going forward.

Anyhoo, that’s enough for this post, else we’ll be at 1k words and this was more than the timeGivenToPublish: 20 minutes hours type of new unfounded measurement of time that I somehow invented 😂😂😂

Good Day to you all & go tinker with things - never just blindly accepting the defaults. RIP Abel - this post is dedicated to you & I know how sorey missed you are by us all that knew you, whether closely or (like me) from afar.