Data for Nerds

If you’re reading this, you’re our kind of people. Below is the full mission technical readout for hugorathbun.com — what it’s built on, why we picked what we picked, and the easter eggs you may not have noticed.

// 01 — The Stack

// 02 — The recursion

This is the whole reason the site exists in this form:

Hugo (the human, born April 28, 2026, weighing 7 lbs 4 oz) is being celebrated by Hugo (the static site generator, written in Go in 2013 by Steve Francia) on a website named after the human, built by the framework, about both Hugos.

In the Universe Timeline, the entry for the year 2013 is the Hugo SSG release. The entry for April 28, 2026 is Hugo Rathbun’s birth. They are in the same scrolling list. The framework that builds the page about him is also a numbered entry on the page about him.

This is intentional. Strict layer violation. We stand by it.

// 03 — What’s actually doing the work

Hugo SSG (the framework)

• Markdown files in content/ (one per page) are processed by Goldmark with unsafe = true so we can mix HTML and Markdown freely.
• Custom shortcodes in layouts/shortcodes/ give us our reusable building blocks:
  • {{< timeline >}} — wraps a vertical timeline section
  • {{< hugofact >}} — a single timeline entry with year, name, tag, and optional featured="true" (the bigger glowing one for Hugo Rathbun himself)
  • {{< astronaut >}} — drops in a pixel-art astronaut pose with a caption (poses: idle, wave, thumbs, jump, run, sitting, sleeping, right)
  • {{< hero >}} — hero block (now mostly retired since frontmatter.title handles it)
• Menu is configured in hugo.toml, no JS required.
• Site builds in ~23 milliseconds. Hugo is famous for being fast and we’re just here to confirm that.

Vercel

• Auto-detected the Hugo framework when we ran vercel deploy — no config needed beyond a tiny vercel.json pinning Hugo 0.140.2.
• Deploy time end-to-end: ~7–8 seconds, including upload, build, and global CDN propagation.
• Production URL updates live as soon as the deploy aliases — www.hugorathbun.com re-points to the new deployment within a second.
• The apex domain hugorathbun.com 307-redirects to www. www is the canonical host.

CSS (no Tailwind, no SASS, no PostCSS)

• One file: static/css/main.css, ~600 lines.
• Custom property tokens for color, type, layout, radius, glow.
• Mobile-first with @media (min-width: …) breakpoints up.
• Uses modern CSS: aspect-ratio, clamp(), grid-template-areas, :has() (where supported), mix-blend-mode for the scanlines, backdrop-filter for the sticky header blur, font-variation-settings for the variable Fraunces font.
• Zero JavaScript-driven styling. Everything is CSS-only.

Fonts

• Fraunces (variable, optical-sizing-aware serif) — the cinematic display headings.
• Inter (variable sans) — body copy.
• JetBrains Mono — the technical readouts, telemetry, mission codes, age counter.
• All loaded from Google Fonts with display=swap and preconnect.

JavaScript (the small amount that exists)

There are exactly two pieces of runtime JS in the entire site:

1. The live age counter on the homepage — counts days/hours/minutes/seconds since 2026-04-28T11:37:00-07:00, updates every second.
2. The mission control T+ counter in the top bar — same idea, but in the format Xd HH:MM:SS, present on every page.

Both are inline <script> blocks. No bundler, no module imports, no framework. Plain setInterval. ~25 lines each.

// 04 — Easter eggs and details you may have missed

• The astronaut on the homepage is wearing a NASA-style mission patch reading “HUGO”. (Generated from a custom prompt, hand-edited.)
• There are 8 distinct astronaut poses scattered across the site. Each chapter gets its own. The footer always gets the sleeping one with the floating heart. Bedtime, every page, every time.
• The mission control bar at the top of every page reads T+Xd XX:XX:XX — that’s the mission elapsed time since Hugo’s first breath, updating every second, on every page.
• The age counter on the homepage uses phosphor green (#6dffb0) with a glow filter — meant to evoke a 1969 Apollo flight computer CRT readout.
• CRT scanlines are overlaid across the entire viewport at very low opacity (mix-blend-mode: multiply) to give a subtle “old monitor” feel. You probably barely noticed. That was the point.
• A blueprint grid is layered behind everything — 80px major lines + 16px minor lines, very faint. Schematic energy.
• Corner brackets on the homepage hero image are NASA-red registration marks — the way an official NASA photograph is framed in the Graphics Standards Manual.
• The mission stripe in the footer is the official NASA red / cream / NASA blue in proportion.
• Chapter cards have a NASA-red left stripe (3px) and a “STAGE I — UNIVERSE” / “STAGE II — LINEAGE” mission designation in monospace. Each chapter is a stage of the mission.
• The site logo is a circular mission-patch SVG (rendered inline, not a raster image) — red ring, dashed inner ring, NASA-style swooping curve, “H” monogram, and three tiny stars.
• The Universe Timeline weaves cosmic events (Big Bang, asteroid extinction, Voyager 1 launch) into the same vertical list as the human Hugos (Capet, Grotius, Victor Hugo, Gernsback, Weaving). The framework Hugo and the human Hugo are entries 23 and 30, respectively.
• The Fawkes connection in the timeline (Hugo Weaving played V, who wore a Guy Fawkes mask, and Hugo’s middle name is Fawkes) was, somehow, real.
• The OG image on social shares is the cinematic “Welcome to the Universe, Hugo” illustration. It also serves as the homepage hero.

// 05 — What’s still being built

Honest disclosure — the following are still on the runway:

• A proper natal chart SVG rendered at build time using astronomy-engine (currently the /cosmos page shows a Mission Telemetry block + a Stellarium Web link)
• A light cone tracker (“light from your birth has traveled X light-minutes”) — Vercel Edge function streaming via SSE
• Time-capsule posts that auto-publish on Hugo’s future birthdays (5th, 13th, 18th, 21st) — daily Vercel Cron rebuilds gated on publishDate
• An AI-generated bedtime story that opens a PR every week from the milestone log
• An ActivityPub feed so grandma can follow @hugo@hugorathbun.com on Mastodon (we’re keeping this option open)

// 06 — How to tell this site is built on Hugo

Open the page source on any page. The very first <meta> tag in <head> reads:

<meta name="generator" content="Hugo 0.140.2">

That’s the SSG telling you, formally, on every single page, that this whole thing is a Hugo site about Hugo. Hugo is so confident about being Hugo that it puts its name on every page it builds.

Honestly, kind of a flex.

// 07 — Repo

The source is on GitHub: github.com/tgauss — built on Vercel, deployed in seconds, free to fork.

Built with love for Hugo by @tgauss. The recursion is the point.

— end of transmission —