I’ve decided to switch my website to the amazing hugo static site generator and in this post I’ll explain the reason and my experience with hugo in general.
What did I use before?
My website was built with plain HTML using bulma CSS
Plain HTML might sound tough to maintain but I actually also wrote my own script to generate the output, this allowed to add extremely basic templating so I didn’t have to keep repeating code in every page.
It was fast and simple, I wanted to be “The Minimalist” plus it was satisfying to say that I wrote the entire website myself as opposed to using a pre-made theme with a popular static site generator.
Prior to that I also actually used Jekyll, which I missed a lot of its features when I switched to my basic setup.
Creating a blog
I enjoyed blogging a bit in Jekyll which I missed so I tried to implement a blog in my other site but I just couldn’t get satisfied with the results and I pretty much abandoned the site, it’s been a long time since I ever touched it.
The website looked good but I was scared of moving forward, it felt like any little feature I add just makes me hate the code even more.
I’m also really bad at CSS and web design overall, I missed the perfectly designed themes for Jekyll.
And I just lost any motivation to touch that website.
I wanted to come back to blogging somehow so I was kind of reconsidering Jekyll but…
Why not Jekyll?
I don’t know really. I just didn’t feel like going back to Jekyll and I kept hearing about Hugo which I kept ignoring but it was time to show a little attention to it and I wasn’t disappointed.
Hugo sounded like my previous minimal script and the power of Jekyll combined together which looked appealing.
I also like that it’s not dependent on Ruby or any package managers, it’s just a single binary with everything you could ever need.
Productivity
While my previous website was “minimal” it was too minimal that it even hurt productivity, hugo managed to bring back my motivation for blogging and it makes it so easy, I just focus on the content and when I feel like it I can put some effort to customize the theme sometimes, great right? With my previous site it was incomplete and everytime I focus on the content I hit a roadblock that I need to first implement in my build script which most of the time just made me say “I’ll do it later.”
Hugo has everything I could ever ask for, the simplicity and performance of my previous website and all the greatness I missed from Jekyll = All my motivation is back.
Conclusion
I’m really loving hugo so far and I will continue to blog more and hugo is now one more thing I learned about that I’ll try to make use of in future projects when needed.