Octopress to Hexo to Hugo
This blog post is really just to say “Wow! Hugo is freakin’ awesome!”
Octopress
Octopress definitely got the job done and introduced me to static blog generators, but I had no real desire to learn Ruby and lately with Windows 10, I’ve booted up to Linux less and less (yes, Windows 10 really is pretty good - if only it had a bash terminal). Installing Ruby on Windows just wasn’t something I wanted to bother with. Also, if I wanted to change the underlying templates, it just seemed more complicated than it really needed to be and I couldn’t find the time or motivation to really bother changing the default template much.
Hexo
Soooooooo… the next logical step seemed to be Hexo. NodeJS - easy enough on Windows and I’ve done a little node development here and there so here we go. Somehow this just seemed a bit kludgy too. It’s a decent enough project, but just didn’t quite feel right.
Hugo
I’ve been looking for excuses to learn Go, so on a whim, googled static blog generators and Go. I’m yet to really learn any Go from using Hugo (other than perusing the code), but still it’s nice to know it’s there if I need to dig through source to figure out what’s up or want to dive deeper and contribute to the project.
At any rate, Hugo just feels right. Not only was I able to migrate my existing blog fairly quickly, but it was not only easy, but also fun to start hacking on an existing theme.
Reasons I love Hugo:
- Installation is just a matter of adding a .exe to your PATH and your good to go. Can’t argue with that.
- Good documentation - was fairly easy to get started (one hint though: you need to specify a theme or it will seem like it’s failing silently)
- Go templates seem mostly straightforward and powerful
- SPEED - this wasn’t really a criteria for me since this blog is pretty small but with Hugo’s speed (100ms to generate this blog) along with its built-in live reload, development is easy and fun.
This blog is currently running off a moderately modified Steam theme. Development is fun enough that hopefully it will continue to evolve (in other words, I don’t feel like I’m fighting the framework with Hugo).
I also found these resources especially helpful for migration: