Open External Links in a New Tab With Hugo

After months of faffing around and configuring external links manually in Hugo, I decided there must be a better way. There is! Here’s the solution that worked for me for my bookstore links. Some themes include native support, so it’s a case of checking the documentation and adding a line to your hugo.yaml or hugo.toml config file. If, like me, you’re using a theme that doesn’t support this feature, here’s a method that might work for you. ...

18 September, 2025 · 3 min · 582 words · Catherine Pope

How to Automatically Sync AudioPen Notes with Obsidian

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of AudioPen for a few years. This brilliant app records and accurately transcribes your voice notes in moments. You can either opt for a light tidy to add punctuation and remove your ums and ahs, or ask it to make you sound like Cicero. Although you can organise your notes in AudioPen using folders and tags, most of us nerdy types already have a preferred note-taking app. In my case, that’s Obsidian. If you don’t know Obsidian, it’s a powerful yet simple app that stores your notes and plain markdown files and gives you various ways to make connections between them. ...

15 September, 2025 · 3 min · 479 words · Catherine Pope

Manage Multiple Hugo Versions with Docker

Hugo is usually the simple solution for website generation. Recently, though, I ran into a frustrating situation: the theme I wanted to use for one site required an older version of Hugo, whereas another site demanded the latest version. Although it’s possible to run multiple Hugo versions on the same machine, life is already complicated enough. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how you can build and preview a Hugo site with a Docker container. ...

15 September, 2025 · 4 min · 684 words · Catherine Pope

Previewing Jekyll Sites with Docker

Introduction Jekyll is a beautifully simple way to build and deploy a static website. Well, it’s simple once you’ve got everything installed and configured. Unless you’re already confident with Ruby, it’ll probably take you most of a wet weekend to get it running consistently. Although the local installation is working well for me, I’m nervous it’ll break. I’m already encountering a few Ruby conflicts with other projects. Resolving those issues isn’t my idea of fun. Given I’ve been doing a lot of work with Docker lately, I decided to see whether I could run my site as a container instead. Plot spoiler: yes, I could! ...

14 August, 2022 · 3 min · 590 words · Catherine Pope

How to Create an Interactive Checklist in InDesign

In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how you can create a checklist in InDesign that’s both interactive and printable. I’m assuming you already know the basics of InDesign. If not, I recommend the InDesign Essentials course on Skillshare.

18 March, 2021 · 1 min · 39 words · Catherine Pope

How to Create a Content Library with Readwise

If you’re anything like me, you consume all sorts of content: books, blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts. It’s hard keeping track of it all. In this short demo, I’ll show you Readwise, a web-based tool for collecting, organising, and reviewing your highlights. I’m not associated in any way with Readwise, I just love it!

11 March, 2021 · 1 min · 54 words · Catherine Pope

Capture Handwritten Notes with a Rocketbook

There are lots of great note-taking apps out there, but sometimes you just want to scribble with a pen and paper. In this short demo, I’ll show how the Rocketbook gives you the best of analogue and digital.

11 February, 2021 · 1 min · 38 words · Catherine Pope

Boost Your Productivity with TextExpander

We spend a lot of our day typing the same stuff over and over again, sometimes getting it wrong in the process. Although it might only be 10 minutes of repetitive keystrokes, this really adds up. That’s an hour a week or more than 50 hours each year. You could do a lot more exciting stuff with those 50 hours. In this video, I’ll give you a quick demo of TextExpander, a great app for saving time and improving accuracy. ...

30 January, 2021 · 1 min · 80 words · Catherine Pope

Easy Noise Reduction with Audacity

Once you get into audio and video recording, background noise will drive you absolutely mad. Although there are lots of solutions out there, most of them are very complicated and often expensive, too. In this short video, I’ll show you a simple method for removing background noise in a free tool called Audacity.

14 January, 2021 · 1 min · 53 words · Catherine Pope