There’s a particular kind of paralysis that hits when you open a new directory. Nothing exists. Every choice is a first choice. You spend two hours deciding whether the README should have a table of contents, and by the end of the day you’ve shipped nothing.
Here is the smallest viable scaffold I’ve found for getting a personal site from mkdir to hugo serve in twenty minutes.
The four things every scaffold needs
- A clear entry point. One page that renders. Not three — one. If the homepage works, the rest is iteration.
- A design system you don’t argue with. Pick tokens (colors, type, spacing) once. Stop picking them again.
- A content convention. One folder for posts. One filename pattern. That’s it.
- A deployment target you already know. Netlify, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages — pick the one whose docs you’ve read before.
What to defer
- RSS. Add it later, after you have three posts.
- Comments. You don’t need them on day one.
- Search. Same.
- A taxonomy. Tags are fine; categories are an invitation to organize instead of write.
What to never defer
- The first post. Ship with one piece of real content in the repo. Even if it’s short. Even if it’s rough. The site is not real until there’s something to read.
The point isn’t the scaffold. The point is making the path from “I have an idea” to “this idea has a URL” short enough that you’ll actually walk it.