Skate Buffalo: 2026 update
Wed, Jun 24, 2026
I followed up my Skatelog project with updates to my Hugo-powered website: Skate Buffalo. I had barely touched it for almost two years. I used to be well-versed in Hugo—I made an entire theme in the past—but that was eight years ago.
My first task was updating the Hugo version and the theme. Somewhere in the process I learned about Hugo modules. So, I removed the submodule I had for the theme, and replaced it with a submodule. I was prepared for many errors between this and the version update, but it was painless.
Next I worked on the map. Originally I made a custom Google Map for the website. Since I used Leaflet with Skate Index, I wanted to replace the map with Leaflet.
The advantage to Leaflet was that I could have skateparks added to the map automatically (and removed from it). Also I could do additional styling. The downside is it's more to manage in the project. I had example code to use, so this part was straightforward.
Now I had two external libraries that Skate Buffalo uses:
Leaflet and Flickity.
To keep things simple I added the Javascript and CSS files to my repo.
But it bugged me that it made the Github languages visualization incorrect.
Thus, I removed the vendor files and wrote a script to download them.
It's just curl, unzip, and mv.
Also I gitignored the directory I downloaded them to, so I don't need to download the files all the time.
One thing that always annoyed me about Skate Buffalo was that the photo carousel showed up in the skatepark summary. The result is the skateparks list has 10 photo carousels. I think it's reasonable to expect visitors to click a link to get to the carousel. I put this off in the past, but it was easy to fix. I already have a shortcode for the carousel. I added the featured image to the shortcode. Then I used CSS to hide the carousel everywhere except the individual skatepark page. And the featured image is visible only on the skatepark list page.
One thing that worried me about Skate Buffalo was that all the photos were 4K. I was worried that users would accidentally use a gigabyte of data browsing skateparks. The obvious solution is to re-size the photos in the repo. But I like having the full-size photos available. In a way I kind of punted this problem. I added a script to the deployment pipeline that uses ImageMagick to resize the images to 1080p. Yes the repo is still bloated and it added more time to the deployment job, but that worries me less than unnecessarily huge photos on the live website.
I added photos of skateparks in Ontario, the southern tier, and Rochester. I really wasn't sure about this. After all, the website is Skate Buffalo. On the other hand, I'm a Buffalo skateboarder, and I was curious about these skateparks. Plus, people using the website may be in Batavia, or Lewiston, or Gowanda. They may be closer to Jamestown or Brockport than to Amherst. If that's not justification enough, I also added new tags, so that visitors could see only the original list of skateparks if that's what they want.
In addition to the new skateparks, I updated the existing skateparks. For example, the old Hamburg skatepark has been dismantled. I removed it. And I removed tags from defunct skateparks, so the tags list is more reliable.
The list of skateshops on the Map page felt sloppy to me. First, it was on the Map page. It didn't feel like a good spot for it. I made two changes related to this. I added a data file with local skateshops. I use this data to populate the map. Also I use it to populate the new Shops page. Instead of a table, I made a list of cards. This task required the most learning. I had to learn how to combine pages from the skatepark list and elements of data into a single list, so I could sort them all by title. And I knew nothing about Hugo data before this. Also I added two new shortcodes: a website shortcode and a shops-list shortcode. I think it looks a lot better than the table.
Sadly the Ananke theme has no dark mode. I tried the Stack theme. I hoped it would be just a matter of changing the theme. However, I had to make a bunch of changes: replacing featured_image with image, setting skateparks to be the main section, changing the partial used for custom CSS and Javascript, and undoing the photo carousel changes I made. I think it looks nice, but I'm not ready to commit to it.
I ended up making my own dark "theme" for Ananke. I'm not sure it looks very good. But hopefully it's an improvement over a white background.
That's everything so far! I have no more changes planned, but I might think of something. I'm still not sure what my next project will be after this.