attempts

Writings about AI, philosophy, life, sports, kids.

Reminders to myself.

Built with Hugo and the PaperMod theme, deployed to GitHub Pages at https://thomasht86.github.io/attempts/.

Writing

hugo new content posts/my-post.md   # creates a draft
hugo server -D                      # live preview at http://localhost:1313 (-D includes drafts)

Set draft = false when a post is ready, then push to main. GitHub Actions builds and deploys it.

• Code fences are highlighted at build time (Chroma).
• ```mermaid fences render as diagrams (mermaid.js is loaded only on pages that use it).

Cross-posting to X

Add crosspost = ['x'] to a post's front matter. When the post is published, the deploy workflow also publishes it as an X Article: images and mermaid diagrams are uploaded, code and tables are kept, and the article ends with a link back to the post. Each post goes out once; data/crossposts/x.json records what was posted, and the workflow commits it back (run git pull afterwards).

• Preview the conversion: uv run scripts/crosspost_x.py --dry-run --file content/posts/<post>.md
• Edits made after a post is on X don't sync; the X API can't update an article. Edit it on X by hand.
• X accepts PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP images. Other formats (SVG) are replaced by a text placeholder.
• Needs X Premium, plus an X developer app with OAuth 1.0a user tokens (read and write) stored as repo secrets: X_API_KEY, X_API_SECRET, X_ACCESS_TOKEN, X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET. Without the secrets, the job skips cross-posting with a warning.

Built to keep working for years

• Hugo version is pinned in .github/workflows/pages.yml (HUGO_VERSION). Use the same version locally. To upgrade, bump it, run hugo server, and fix any warnings.
• The theme is a copy in themes/PaperMod/ (not a submodule), taken from upstream commit d3768854 (2026-08-02). Edit it freely.
• mermaid.js is a local copy (static/js/mermaid.min.js, v11.17.2), so no CDN is needed.

Notes

• content/old/ holds the posts migrated from the MkDocs site. They keep their old URLs through url in the front matter, and they are listed only at /old/, not on the home page, archive or RSS (mainSections in hugo.toml). New posts go in content/posts/ and get /posts/<slug>/.
• archive/ holds the original Norwegian posts. They are not published.
• static/twister/ is a standalone HTML app, served as-is.