I decided I wanted to experiment with my linkblog again, which uses the Hugo SSG tool. However, I upgraded my Hugo installation sometime in the last 3 months, so I had a feeling there was going to be some breakage, and I was correct. When I tried to rebuild the site as-is, I got this kind of error:
ERROR error building site: html/template:_partials/disqus.html:1:12: no such template “_internal/disqus.html”
After some searching, it appeared that the latest version of Hugo made some changes in the default structure for Hugo sites (ugh) and the recommendation was to see if theme owners had made updates. I then decided to get the latest version of the Anubis2 Hugo theme, and to move the content folder to the main directory instead of the example-site folder.
The next error blocking a rebuild was the following:
ERROR The “twitter”, “tweet”, and “twitter_simple” shortcodes were deprecated in v0.142.0 and removed in v0.156.0. Please use the “x” shortcode instead.
I then removed “twitter” and “tweet” shortcodes from several posts to clear the above error. This led to the next error:
ERROR error building site: render: [en v1.0.0 guest] failed to render pages: render of “C:/Hugo/hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026/main/content/posts/demo-code-pre-kbd-mark.md” failed: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts\baseof.html:14:11”: execute of template failed: template: page.html:14:11: executing “head” at <partial “head/head.html” .>: error calling partial: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts_partials\head\head.html:76:5”: execute of template failed: template: _partials/head/head.html:76:5: executing “_partials/head/head.html” at <partial “resource.html” (dict “context” $ “type” “js” “filename” .)>: error calling partial: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts_partials\resource.html:8:25”: execute of template failed: template: _partials/resource.html:8:25: executing “_partials/resource.html” at <resources.Get>: error calling Get: CreateFile C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\assets\https:\cdn.jsdelivr.net\npm@tailwindcss\browser@4: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
At this point, I felt I should look at some other options. I reviewed some themes and tutorials for the Eleventy SSG but the first tutorial I tried had an error. I then went to the main site, and the “Get Started” page barely created a single page. I reviewed some blog themes, but did not see much to my liking. I then took a look at Astro but it felt even more overwhelming than Eleventy, and again no simple blog themes to be found.
I then went ahead and fired up Claude Code, pasted in the Hugo error message, and asked for suggestions. Claude found a bug in the theme when being built on Windows systems (removed 3 lines from a file). After that, the site built successfully, and looked the same as before. I felt relief and anger and the same time – aaaarrrrrgh! Why did this have to be so difficult! This reminded me why I use WordPress for my main blog – It Just Works.