Leo Martin's Website

In the spirit of the new year I just quickly want to explain why I use a static site generator for this website, and it does have something to do with the new year.

Already a long time back I’ve always liked the footers of websites because they portrayed a sense of professionality. Having "© 2025 Leo Martin" on your website looks better than having it just blank. On top of that it’s also a nice indicator of how long the website has been unmaintained, though most of the time the maintainer just does not have a way to change the date every year.

And here we come to the topic of this post. This websites code is all handwritten html that evolved over the years. After a while I noticed that it’s cumbersome to always have to update each page if I wanted to change the navbar or footer for example. And I’ve been thinking about the date in the footer a lot, even thinking about including some javascript to set the date. But this is not a pretty solution nor does it solve the rest of the problems I’ve been having. That’s when I had the idea to write a script that generates the pages based on parts like the navbar or footer, this essentially is what a static site generator does.

A while later I found out about Hugo, which is what I’m using for the website now. Hugo is way more powerfull than my script could have ever been. So for the last 6 months I’ve been porting my site to hugo and improving it by a lot. I tried to add every function I saw in the documentation because it felt nice not having to do something manually and just let the program compile my website.

But the very first thing I did was to set the date in the footer with this code

{{ now.Format "2006" }}

The code explains itself. You format the current date (now) of now to only output the four digit year number. It’s so little but will save me so much time on each year change.

The thing is that I couldn’t test it to see if it really works but today is the day where I can finally see if it works. There are many reasons why to use a static site generator for your personal site or just any website, and setting the date on the footer is one of them.

Happy new year!