40 Years of Blues in Barcelona
Photographic and biographical archive of Barcelona's blues scene: 148 musicians, three languages, Hugo and GitHub Pages.
A living archive for a paper archive
On November 6, 2026, the book 40 Years of Blues in Barcelona by Joan Linux with texts by Manuel López Poy was presented at Centre Cultural Collblanc – La Torrassa.
Commissioned by 112books.eu — the photography publisher that Joan directs.
The accompanying website is not merely a book listing: it is a living photographic and biographical archive of Barcelona’s blues scene.
The challenge
Organize 148 musician profiles, 531 formations, and 296 black-and-white photographs across three languages. Without a content management system. Without unnecessary external dependencies. So anyone can search for a musician, see their face, understand why Barcelona is a blues city, and navigate connections: which other musician plays the same instrument, which bands share members, which musicians played together over the years.
The solution
- Hugo as a static site generator with a custom theme
- GitHub Actions + GitHub Pages to publish on every
git push - Images in WebP with
srcset— original photographs are large, but each page loads only its size - Total hyperlinking — each musician links to their bands, fellow musicians, their instruments, and musical references (Wikipedia links and external sources)
- Structured data (Person, BreadcrumbList, Organization) so search engines understand the content
- Native search and navigation by taxonomy: 27 instruments, formations, birth years, relational
- GoatCounter for privacy-respecting analytics
The result
Total data sovereignty: the repository is public, the website is independent, no third-party processing. The original cover weighed 3.5 MB; now it weighs 528 KB. Three languages (Catalan, Spanish, English) share the same content: names remain original, texts are contextualized, not literally translated.
Intelligent content reuse: each musician came with an associated list of external references (reference musicians, living musicians admired, emblematic groups). Instead of discarding it, we converted it into internal and external hyperlinks: from any musician’s profile you can reach their mentors, bandmates, collaborators, and influences.
Dynamism: every time the homepage loads, a featured musician appears at random so you never see the same face twice in a row. The website isn’t static, it’s alive.
Community: newsletter and Telegram channel (@40anysbluesbarcelona) to keep users informed of new incorporations, presentations, discoveries, and news about Barcelona’s blues scene.
A model that works for cultural projects: multilingual, accessible, fast, without extra infrastructure, and that transforms historical documentation into navigation.
