---
title: "Adding External Link Markers in Hugo and Bear"
published: "2024-08-03T14:33:30.500740Z"
updated: "2024-08-03T14:33:30.500740Z"
---

I tend to drop a lot of links in my posts. Some point to other posts/pages within the same site, but many point to external sites. As a *reader*, I like to know where a link is going to take me, but as a *writer*, I'm not always great about indicating that context within the text.

I mentioned in my [inaugural "This Week" post](/this-week-2024-06-29/) that I recently discovered how to use [Hugo's link render-hook templates](https://gohugo.io/render-hooks/links/) to automatically apply a little `↗` marker to external links posted on [runtimeterror](https://runtimeterror.dev). All that took was creating `layouts/_default/_markup/render-link.html` with the following content to overwrite the default rendering:

<div class="highlight">```
<span></span>{{- $u := urls.Parse .Destination -}}
<a href="{{ .Destination | safeURL }}"
  {{- with .Title }} title="{{ . }}"{{ end -}}
  {{- if $u.IsAbs }} rel="external"{{ end -}}
>
  {{- with .Text | safeHTML }}{{ . }}{{ end -}}
  {{- if $u.IsAbs }}↗{{ end -}}
</a>
{{- /* chomp trailing newline */ -}}
```

</div>That works well with Hugo since the marker gets inserted into the HTML source code at build time. But what about here on Bear?

So I went looking for a CSS-based solution that would work here. It only took about 30 seconds of searching to find [a post from Jake Bauer](https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/styling-external-links/) with the relevant CSS bits.

All I needed was to add this block to my Bear theme CSS:

<div class="highlight">```
<span></span><span class="nt">a</span><span class="o">[</span><span class="nt">href</span><span class="o">^=</span><span class="s2">"http"</span><span class="o">]</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="nd">where</span><span class="o">(</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="nd">not</span><span class="o">([</span><span class="nt">href</span><span class="o">*=</span><span class="s2">"srsbsns.lol/"</span><span class="o">]))</span><span class="p">::</span><span class="nd">after</span><span class="w"> </span><span class="p">{</span>
<span class="w">    </span><span class="k">content</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="w"> </span><span class="s2">"↗"</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
```

</div>That was surprisingly easy, and today I learned you can use complex/compound selectors to perform pattern matching with CSS. Neat!

=> https://srsbsns.lol/adding-external-link-markers-in-hugo-and-bear/ 📡 Originally posted on jbowdre's weblog