So, I added a book list to my site. Just a simple page of the books I’ve read, and recommend. But, adding it wasn’t fun. Not because I had a lot of books that I wanted on there (though that didn’t help), but because of Hugo.

Hug-no

My first thought for this page, was to have one page file. Like how I do with my thing I use page. I abandoned that idea quickly, because it sucks. I ended up have each book be it’s own “post”, then have Hugo put them all on one page. That lets me better control the look. But, Hugo didn’t want to make it easy.

Pretty much all of a books data is defined in the “posts” front matter. For example

---
title: "Project Hail Mary"
author: Andy Weir
amazon: "https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B08FHBV4ZX/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0"
kobo: "https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/project-hail-mary-1?sId=60b1b750-4fa6-4636-8a46-d6dce2137728"
ebooks: "https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210098536/project-hail-mary/andy-weir/"
date: 2025-07-16T14:07:19-04:00
draft: false
---
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Hugo has a wonderful feature, that lets you have predefined front matter, for a section, when making a new post. But it didn’t want to work. At all. It wouldn’t even use by default one, just the internal default. Yay Hugo.

Unfortunately, I only thought of writing a bash script to do all this for me, after doing it all by hand. Yay /s. In the end, the bash script is better. So if you like books (and mostly science fiction), check it out.