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Building a Personal Website with Hugo and PaperMod Theme

Learn how to create a personal website using Hugo and the PaperMod theme, including setup, features, and project structure.

Shipped January 2026

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A personal website built with Hugo using the PaperMod theme. It serves as a platform to share honest, unfiltered content without pretense or narrative constraints.

Features

  • Static site generated with Hugo
  • Uses the PaperMod Hugo theme for a clean, responsive design
  • Supports pagination, reading time, share buttons, and post navigation
  • Configurable theme with dark/light mode support
  • Multi-author support with customizable profiles
  • Content organized in posts, tags, categories, and series
  • SEO-friendly with robots.txt enabled
  • Supports comments toggle (disabled by default)
  • Multilingual support via PaperMod theme translations

Tech Stack

  • Hugo static site generator
  • PaperMod Hugo theme
  • HTML, YAML for configuration

Getting Started

Prerequisites

  • Install Hugo (version >= 0.112.4 recommended)

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/justin-napolitano/notzine.com.git
cd notzine.com

Run locally

hugo server -D

This will start a local server with draft content disabled by default.

Build for production

hugo --minify

The generated site will be in the public directory.

Project Structure

  • archetypes/ - Hugo archetypes for new content templates
  • content/ - Markdown files for posts and pages
  • data/ - Data files for site-wide data
  • layouts/ - Custom Hugo templates
  • public/ - Generated static site output
  • resources/ - Hugo resource files
  • static/ - Static assets like images, CSS, JS
  • themes/ - Contains the PaperMod theme
  • config.yaml - Main Hugo configuration file
  • CNAME - Custom domain configuration

Future Work / Roadmap

  • Enable comments system if needed
  • Add more customization to profile mode and home-info mode
  • Expand content types beyond posts
  • Integrate analytics and social media more deeply
  • Improve SEO and accessibility features
  • Explore multilingual content support

This README is based on current repository contents and configuration. Some assumptions were made due to lack of explicit documentation.

Need more context?

Want help adapting this playbook?

Send me the constraints and I'll annotate the relevant docs, share risks I see, and outline the first sprint so the work keeps moving.

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