Iām not a developer. At least, Iām learning a lot about languages, development, and using the terminal, but itās not natural to me yet. In fact, a lot of it still doesnāt make sense. Iām hovering around āconscious incompetenceā and āconscious competenceāĀ and often, when I do get things to work, Iām not entirely sure whyā¦
This afternoon I spent a good hour or two going round in circles on a problem. Iām relying on ChatGPT and/or Claude to help me through troubleshooting, and when I find one of their blindspots, I really can get lost. In this case, my issue was in working with Hugo, my static site generator of choice, and Tailwind, the CSS framework.
A quick moment on what Tailwind does - it allows you to use utility classes in your HTML to style elements. So for example, in a traditional CSS approach, you might want to style a section of paragraph text, so youād add:
<p class="fancy-text">This is my fancy text</p>
then go to your style sheet and create the relevant CSS rules:
.fancy-text {
font-size: 1.5rem;
font-color: blue;
text-decoration: underline;
}
Tailwind allows you (indeed, encourages you) to do this inline, so that itās very clear where the styling is coming from. The above would become:
<p class="text-xl text-blue-500 underline">This is my fancy text</p>
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but Iām trying it out on my latest project.
When running Hugoās handy live server, which allows me to work in the trial-and-error manner which I need as a novice, the Tailwind classes donāt update live by default. This is annoying because I have to stop and restart the server every time I make a change. Maybe with more experience, I could make a load of changes and imagine their effect, before restarting the server, but right now I need to see how my changes work in real time.
Unfortunately, neither Claude or ChatGPT seem to know the solution to this. Anyone whoās run up against an AI blindspot like this will recognise itās responses:
Ah ā now that explains itā¦
Ah, now itās clear ā ā¦
Ah ā now it makes senseā¦
I should have given up on this route sooner, because a quick search led me to Hugo Tutorial, which was a good start. Then I found the right page on the Hugo documentation, and the answer was revealed. Of course, ChatGPT pretended it knew all along:
Absolutely, Ralph ā Iām glad you found the solution that works for you.
The css.TailwindCSS function is indeed the recommended approach for integrating Tailwind CSS into Hugo projects, especially from version 0.128.0 onwards. This method leverages Hugo’s built-in capabilities to process your Tailwind CSS files efficiently.
