Build a site that feels unmistakably yours. on Blowfish

Welcome to Blowfish

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish is packed with tons of features.

The original aim of Blowfish was to develop a theme that was simple and lightweight. The theme is a fork of Congo and expands its initial vision.

Installation

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Simply follow the standard Hugo Quick Start procedure to get up and running quickly.

Detailed installation instructions can be found below. Instructions for updating the theme are also available.

Agent skill
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Blowfish ships an agent skill that teaches AI coding agents — like Claude Code — how to install, configure, and build sites with the theme. If you use an agent to work on your site, install the skill so it knows its way around Blowfish’s configuration files, layouts, front matter, and shortcodes.

Getting Started

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This section assumes you have already installed the Blowfish theme. Working with an AI coding agent? Blowfish ships an agent skill that teaches agents like Claude Code how to install, configure, and build with the theme — see the installation page to set it up.

The config files that ship with Blowfish contain all of the possible settings that the theme recognises. By default, many of these are commented out but you can simply uncomment them to activate or change a specific feature.

Configuration

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish is a highly customisable theme and uses some of the latest Hugo features to simplify how it is configured.

The theme ships with a default configuration that gets you up and running with a basic blog or static website.

Homepage Layout

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish provides flexible homepage layouts with settings to adjust each design. Alternatively, you can also provide your own template and have complete control over the homepage content.

The layout of the homepage is controlled by the homepage.layout setting in the params.toml configuration file. Additionally, all layouts have the option to include a listing of recent articles.

Shortcodes

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to all the default Hugo shortcodes, Blowfish adds a few extras for additional functionality.

Accordion
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accordion creates a collapsible set of panels. Use the accordionItem sub-shortcode to define each item. You can control whether multiple items can be open at the same time using the mode parameter.

Front Matter

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to the default Hugo front matter parameters, Blowfish adds a number of additional options to customise the presentation of individual articles. All the available theme front matter parameters are listed below.

Multiple Authors

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some websites have more than one author contributing with content and therefore require more than a single default author across the entire website. For those use-cases, Blowfish allows users to extend the list of authors using the multiple authors feature.

Partials

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Analytics
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Blowfish provides built-in support for Fathom Analytics, Google Analytics and Umami Analytics. Fathom is a paid alternative to Google Analytics that respects user privacy.

Thumbnails

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thumbnails
#

Blowfish was enhanced in order to make it easy to add visual support to your posts. To do so, you just need to place an image file (almost all formats are supported but we recommend .png or .jpg) that starts with feature* inside your article’s main directory, as shown in the example below.

Content Examples

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been reading the documentation in order, you should now know about all the features and configurations available in Blowfish. This page is designed to pull everything together and offer some worked examples that you might like to use in your Hugo project.

Series

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish provides a feature to group a set of articles together under a “series”. Placing an article under a series will display the rest of the series articles in each single page and provide a quick way to navigate amongst them. You can see an example of this above.

Advanced Customisation

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are many ways you can make advanced changes to Blowfish. Read below to learn more about what can be customised and the best way of achieving your desired result.

Hosting & Deployment

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are many ways to deploy your Hugo website built with Blowfish. The theme is designed to be flexible in almost any deployment scenario.

Blowfish is built using relative URLs throughout the theme. This enables sites to easily be deployed to sub-folders and hosts like GitHub Pages. There’s usually no special configuration required for this to work as long as the baseURL parameter has been configured in the hugo.toml file.

Firebase: Views & Likes

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In order to be able to support dynamic data across your website we’ve added the support to integrate Firebase. This will allow you to use the views feature across lists and posts.

Build your homepage using Blowfish and Hugo

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Just one year ago, I created Blowfish, a Hugo theme crafted to build my unique vision for my personal homepage. I also decided to make it an open-source project. Fast-forward to today, and Blowfish has transformed into a thriving open-source project with over 600 stars on GitHub and a user base of hundreds. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started and have your website running in a couple of minutes.

Multiple Authors

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A quick example of how multiple authors could be used.

Thumbnails

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A quick example of how to start using Thumbnails in your artciles.

Icons

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish has built-in support for a number of FontAwesome 6 icons. These can be included in your website through either the icon partial or icon shortcode.

Additionally, custom icons are also fully supported. Simply provide your own SVG icon assets by placing them in the assets/icons/ directory in the root of your project. Any icons in the icons directory will then be available to use throughout the theme. In order to achieve automatic color filling, every SVG path needs the fill="currentColor" XML attribute.

Markdown

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article offers a sample of basic Markdown formatting that can be used in Blowfish, also it shows how some basic HTML elements are decorated.

Rich Content

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is an example of a rich content summary.

Placeholder Text

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lorem est tota propiore conpellat pectoribus de pectora summo.

Mathematical notation

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

KaTeX can be used to render mathematical notation within articles.

Charts

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Blowfish includes Chart.js for powerful charts and data visualisations.

Diagrams and Flowcharts

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to add diagrams and flowcharts to articles using Mermaid.

Emoji :parachute:

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

📖🏞️🧗🏽🐉🧙🏽‍♂️🧚🏽👸

Recipe Template

nuno@n9o.xyz (Blowfish) — Tue, 22 Dec 1987 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for wanting to contribute to Blowfish’s community.

How to start?
#

This is a template article that will explain how to create a new article for Blowfish’s guide section.

Build a site that feels unmistakably yours. on Blowfish

Welcome to Blowfish

Installation

Agent skill #

Getting Started

Configuration

Homepage Layout

Shortcodes

Accordion #

Front Matter

Multiple Authors

Partials

Analytics #

Thumbnails

Thumbnails #

Content Examples

Series

Advanced Customisation

Hosting & Deployment

Firebase: Views & Likes

Build your homepage using Blowfish and Hugo

Multiple Authors

Thumbnails

Icons

Markdown

Rich Content

Placeholder Text

Mathematical notation

Charts

Diagrams and Flowcharts

Emoji :parachute:

Recipe Template

How to start? #

Agent skill
#

Accordion
#

Analytics
#

Thumbnails
#

How to start?
#