My Hugo Experiment

I promised myself I’d never switch blogging tools again¹. Then yesterday I ran

across Hugo.

I’ve tried static blogs before using Tinderbox, Octopress, Second Crack,

Blosxom, etc. They all work, some more easily than others, but they all took

too much effort and could be a dependency nightmare. Here’s why I’m trying Hugo

and finding it so encouraging:

1. Speed. Octopress/Jekyll took around 7 minutes to render my blog. That

was always a deterrent to publishing.

2. No dependencies. Hugo is written using Go and comes as

a single binary with no dependencies. A breath of fresh air compared to the

spiderweb of ruby gems and versions required by Jekyll/Octopress.

3. Live Reload. Hugo comes with a mini web server built in and renders the

site locally each time any content or template is changed and reloads the

browser _instantly_. This shortens the feedback loop so much that it feels

like I'm editing the static files directly.

Speaking of speed…

baty.net hugo
0 draft content
0 future content
1875 pages created
96 tags created
3 categories created
in 579 ms

Rendering speed is no longer an issue.

The good news is that I don’t think I broke anything critical this time.

There’s still a lot of theme cleanup I’d like to do yet.

Converting from WordPress was surprisingly easy. I used a plugin by Cyrill Schumacher and had all of my 1800+ posts, images, etc. converted for use with Hugo in less than an hour. All links were preserved so I don’t need to create a bunch of rewrite rules in Apache like every other time I’ve done this. Every step was easier than expected so I just kept going!

UPDATE February 03, 2015: I think Hugo may be the best static site generating CMS available. That said, I’ve gone back to WordPress for baty.net. Mostly because I’m lazy.