Hugo on Nick Liu - Software Engineer

Blowfish supports four analytics providers. Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't one.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For six months I assumed nobody could tell whether anyone read this blog, because I had never added analytics. Wiring up Cloudflare Web Analytics by hand taught me two things: the obvious place to paste the snippet would have shipped my Playwright suite's page views into the dashboard, and the dashboard had been quietly counting my visitors for two months anyway.

Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104

Publishing into the void
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The site’s hugo.toml had a googleAnalytics line commented out since roughly the first commit. I never uncommented it. GA4 wants a cookie disclosure, ships a chunky client, and ad blockers eat it anyway, which felt like a lot of ceremony for a personal blog whose one open question was “does anybody visit.”

My og:image URLs were broken for months. baseURL was the culprit.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paste one of my post links into a social preview and the card comes up with no image. The site itself renders fine, every page, every browser. The culprit was one character in `hugo.toml`: `baseURL = "/"`, which quietly turns every absolute URL the site emits into a relative one that only a browser can love.

Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104

The symptom
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Share cards without images, that was the visible part. View source on any page and the metadata told the fuller story:

A typo fix shouldn't boot a browser in CI. Mine did for months.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I changed one sentence in a blog post, opened a pull request, and watched CI spend about 85 seconds installing a headless Chromium to confirm my prose still turned into HTML. The obvious fix, telling the workflow to ignore content paths, would have quietly broken every merge instead.

Symptom: a browser for a one-line edit
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Every pull request on this blog runs two jobs: a lint job, and a build-and-test job. The second one builds the site with Hugo, link-checks the output with htmltest, then installs a headless Chromium and runs a Playwright suite against a live hugo server. End to end, roughly 85 seconds, and almost all of it is Playwright.