++Wordpress == Hugo

2018-04-10

Finally mustered some courage and got over my laziness to create a post on a statically hosted blog. I had been having a (largely idle) wordpress blog for a while now. In fact, I remember getting there from a long route from static HTML back in those days, a custom wordpress site and a tumblr site.

While I didn't have any major trouble with wordpress, I somewhat felt it was too bulky to what I was looking for. Plus for the customizations that I needed, I had to upgrade as well. Around November of last year, I was at AllThingsOpen at Raleigh and I happened to meet some wonderful folks from Linode. I was intrigued by their offering and immediately jumped on and played around. After monkeying around for a while, I decided to jump on the static blogging wagon.

  1. With Linode being one of the cheapest offerings of compute, this was a no-brainer on the cost front.
  2. Using a static-blog offers for some really quick customizations that might be a bit tedious on a full-blown CMS.
  3. I don't now have to run a database. Yipee!

Although one of the main shortcomings that I foresee is deployment and maintenance of the servers. While the folks at Linode are good about their SLAs, there's nothing better than having someone deal with the administration of your website. But nevertheless, it'll be an interesting exercise to do some sysadmin work from time to time. :D Also, I know I don't get a lot of goodies that you get using a more modern PaaS like Heroku or Netlify like CDNs, out-of-the-box HTTPS etc. Perhaps I'll get there some day! ;)

So why Hugo? Of course, there are a lot of really good offerings out there. I spent quite some time debating between Jekyll, Pelican and Hugo and finally went with Hugo purely for their really good documentation and some gorgeous themes that I liked in the theme showcase. And the fact that it was written in golang also tipped me in its favor.

So, here's my new home on the interwebs. Hopefully I'll find the time in the future to migrate all my existing posts from wordpress to here.