Using Hugo for a blog
Near the end of 2012, I started a blog using Wordpress. At the end of 2014, it fell prey to a hack that inserted hundreds of thousands of spam comments. I’d already been dissatisfied with Wordpress as being awkward to write in, so I spent no effort to fix it.
In May 2015, I started a new blog using Jekyll. This was somewhat better than using Wordpress; it went backwards on features, but was a lot easier to write new blog posts, and was a lot faster. Well, at first. Once I had a hundred blog posts, I noticed Jekyll getting slower and slower, to the point now that it takes 30 seconds to rebuild. That’s annoying. Plus, I hate Liquid, and I’m not really a Ruby fan.
So, after months of light agonizing, I’m going to switch to Hugo.
Big plus is that it’s written in Go, which means it’s almost as good as writing it in C++, both speed-wise and the likelihood that I would ever actually add a feature to it.
Hugo has a Jekyll site importer which I’ll be trying out, but I’m not too worried about that part (and someday I’ll import all the content from my older Wordpress blog):
There is a showcase of Hugo blogs that I imagine I’ll pick through to find an initial template that I like - while I’m picky on look&feel, it’s not to the point where I want to spend a lot of time writing CSS myself.
That said, I’ve been enjoying using Sphinx and reStructuredText for writing documentation, and I’m not really a blogger as in “writing to be read”, instead I write to remember or as reference. I’m ok with using multiple systems, I think.
I expect that whatever I do, I’ll use Disqus to have blog comments. Those are always useful.
I am also considering using Netlify.
Also, Netlify has this cool list of static site generators
StaticGen - Top Open-Source Static Site Generators
Honorable mention - I toyed with the idea of Nikola, because it was at least written in Python.
Another honorable mention is Forestry, which purports to create a CMS from your Jekyll or Hugo blog. I don’t think I need a CMS, but we’ll see. However, this does sound useful for non-technical people.