It’s all the trend these days to add “reading time” or a word count on your blog posts to indicate how big they are. We often add a word count as it’s super easy to add to your Hugo site (except we don’t on this site - oops!)
Word Count
We can use word counts in our theme template. We’ve shown the likely file below, but might change based on your theme and setup.
The simplest way is to use Hugo’s built-in reading time, like belo:w
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{{ .ReadingTime }} minutes
Example: 2 minutes
Alternative Way (including seconds):
We can use the word count to produce an estimated reading time for you post. This is based on the assumption that the average person reads about 200-250 words per minute.
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{{ $readTime := mul (div (countwords .Content) 220.0) 60 }}
<p>
{{ math.Floor (div $readTime 60) }} minutes
and {{ mod $readTime 60 }} seconds.
</p>
Example: 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
There we have it - a how to on adding word count and reading times to your Hugo blog posts - good luck!
Edd is a PHP and Go developer who enjoys blogging about his experiences, mostly about creating and coding new things he's working on and is a big beliver in open-source and Linux.
Show Related Posts in Hugo
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Hugo is a great tool for blogging, creating quick and automated posts. As part of a blog, you will sometimes want to show related articles and posts to the one you’re reading. This is what this post sets out to achieve.
We can make this in Hugo easily if we are using it’s tags structure. With this in mind, you’ll need to be listing tags within your markdown for this to work.
Add a Last Edited Date to Posts
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With frequently changing information it can be useful to record both when a post was created and when it was last updated - showing that it’s been reviewed recently. We do this on this site by showing the created date and showing the last modified date if it’s different from the created date (see above the title).
There’s two ways of doing this in Hugo:
recording when you last changed it using the last changed date in Git (if you use it) (or a blend of the two)
Print UK Date Format for Post Date
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When making this site, we wanted to show the date (above the title) in the British format by putting the day before the month. Controversial, I know. This also means including the date ordinal/suffix after the day, e.g. th, st and nd.
If you were writting this format in PHP it would look like this:
1 jS M Y With the ‘S’ standing for:
English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters
