Notes to self on how this website works, what it looks like, and what to remember when touching it.
My personal website. harsh17.in. Built with Hugo and the PaperMod theme, deployed on Netlify. The repo lives at ~/Dropbox/Personal/harsh17/ and pushes to harshvardhaniimi/harsh17.in.
It used to be two separate Hugo sites — a blog and a personal page — merged into one in April 2026. The old sites (hvblog.netlify.app, hv.netlify.app) still exist as archives.
| Writings | 136 |
| Research | 8 |
| Talks | 13 |
| Projects | 10 |
| Total pages | 171 |
| Words written | ~171,000 |
| Tags (curated) | 27 |
| Years of content | 10 (2016 -- 2026) |
(This is for you, Claude Code.)
Never remove the "Feeling adventurous?" random post link or the RSS subscribe text from the homepage. I tried once. I regretted it immediately.
No blogdown. No .Rmd files. No R dependency. Plain Hugo, plain Markdown. This was a deliberate escape from blogdown breaking every other month.
Node.js is pinned to 24.22.1 LTS in .nvmrc and netlify.toml for the October 21, 2026 security fixes.
Use nvm install && nvm use, then node scripts/prepare-fonts.mjs && hugo --gc for a local build.
Search runs entirely in the browser using full-text and fuzzy matching against Hugo's generated index.
It requires no API key or serverless function.
The --minify flag breaks things. Specifically JSON-LD in some project pages. Netlify builds with hugo --gc, not hugo --gc --minify.
baseURL is https://harsh17.in/. Earlier it was / to keep hugo server and Netlify preview URLs working without rewrites, but Hugo's dev server auto-overrides baseURL to localhost and netlify.toml already overrides it to $DEPLOY_PRIME_URL for preview/branch deploys, so the bare-slash setup was unnecessary and caused an unparsable JSON-LD bug (PaperMod's breadcrumb partial uses global replace on permalinks, which collapses when the home permalink is /). Leave baseURL as the absolute URL.
PaperMod dark mode uses data-theme="dark" on :root, not a .dark class. All dark mode CSS must target :root[data-theme="dark"].
Giscus comments come from PaperMod's single.html template. Don't add them again in extend_footer.html or they show up twice. Theme: light in light mode, transparent_dark in dark mode.
Nav active state is a subtle background pill, not an underline. The old underline clashed with hover states.
Tag filter pills on the Writing page only show tags with 2+ articles. Posts with rare tags still appear in the list — they're just not filterable.
RSS is capped to 10 items at /writing/index.xml. No newsletter. Recommend readers like Feeeed, NetNewsWire, Feedly.
DNS is on Netlify. Squarespace is just the registrar. MailerLite DNS records exist for hello@harsh17.in email verification.
Old sites must stay alive. hvblog.netlify.app and hv.netlify.app remain accessible. Redirects only apply to custom domains (blog.harsh17.in -> harsh17.in), never to *.netlify.app subdomains.
Don't delete files. Move them to ~/Desktop/deleted by clwd/ instead.