Jason’s site is now part of Kagi Small Web — a curated index of personal, non-commercial blogs. We built a Hugo module to add the webring navigation bar and animated seal to every page. Then we discovered it made every page take 16 seconds to build.

What We Built Link to heading

hugo-kagi-smallweb is a reusable Hugo module with three partials: a badge (the animated Kagi seal), a webring bar (prev/next navigation), and styles for <head>. Config is three lines:

[params.kagiSmallWeb]
  enabled   = true
  feedUrl   = "https://www.jason-grey.com/index.xml"

The bar looks like: ← prev.site · [🐝 seal] · Random · next.site →

Kagi provides no webring API — just smallweb.txt, a sorted plain-text list of RSS feed URLs. The module fetches it at build time, finds your position, and derives prev/next with modular arithmetic. We cache it via git submodule so there’s no network dependency on every build.

The 16-Second Build Problem Link to heading

webring-bar.html parsed smallweb.txt on every page render. Multiply that by dozens of posts and builds became unusable.

The fix is Hugo’s partialCached:

{{ partialCached "kagi-smallweb/webring-bar.html" . "kagi-smallweb-bar" }}

Hugo computes the partial once and reuses it. Build time dropped from ~16 seconds per page to 2 seconds total.

The Random Button Link to heading

Instead of linking to the Kagi index (“Browse”), we built an actual random site selector. Hugo shuffles all entries except ours at build time, takes 5, and embeds them as JSON. A one-liner onclick picks randomly client-side — the pool changes every build, every click gets a different site.

The module is at github.com/jt55401/hugo-kagi-smallweb. GPL-3.0. If your site is in the Kagi Small Web list, it should just work.

Kagi Small Web is a good idea. More small personal sites, less algorithmic slop.