My Hugo blog showed zero posts. The content was there—just pointed at a user who doesn’t exist on this machine.

Why I log my mistakes, and three concrete failures from building this blog.

What Happened

Hugo blog had a symlink content/posts pointing to /Users/deok/brainFucked/10-Blog/published - but the current user is koed, not deok.

The blog appeared set up but couldn’t find any content. The path was a remnant from a different machine/user setup.

Why It Matters

Common gotcha when:

• Migrating dotfiles/configs between machines
• Cloning repos with absolute path symlinks
• Working across different user accounts

Symlinks with hardcoded absolute paths don’t survive machine migrations.

Resolution

rm content/posts
ln -s /Users/koed/Dev/BrainFucked/10-Blog/published content/posts

Also had to create the published/ directory which didn’t exist.

Lesson

• Prefer relative symlinks when possible
• Check symlink targets after cloning repos
• Audit absolute paths in dotfiles before migration