I migrated my blog to Hugo

I migrated my blog engine to Hugo. It was running for few years with WordPress previously. It was fine most of the time, but it had a few quirks that I did not like. I was thinking to migrate it to static site generator for few years but I just did not have time to go through it. Finally I decided to give it a go with my new shiny Qwen Flash Next that helps me a lot with my more boring tasks.

Why?

WordPress was so slow. Even opening main page took few seconds. Site is not standing on the fastest machine out there but it is decent server. It is not constantly being used by other services so it was a bit odd to wait while opening every page. What it was really doing there? It was pinging me constantly while I was using editor to, upgrade something or buy some plugin or to pay some SMTP extension to be able to see traffic. Well, I am using my own mail server and I can see the stats there… Also it could not upload SVG files through the editor. I had use scp to copy file like that to its directory and then embed it via editor. Why? This does not makes any sense! To be able to work with that kind of files apparently you need a PLUGIN! What the hell?! Why I cannot just upload SVGs to my own website hosted on my own server? Maybe it does makes sense for non-technical people who are not aware that such image can be dangerous… but come on! I created those SVGs myself! I know what is there. It was not bad. Just annoying and it was not earning its keep.

And it was slow. Did I mentioned that it was slow?

Some Details

It worked and right now it runs as pure static html website with some small addition of few JS libraries to allow more fancy features (like mermaid diagrams).

I used Hugo for that. I am not entirely sure how I feel about adding new posts in yaml files that are saved in .md file, without any helpers. But on the other hand it is really, really fast when you navigate it. It should be since it is just HTML file.

Site is served from S3 compatible storage, garage via nginx. Garage seems really great so far. I have it running in two replicas so even if one replica is going down I can serve my website from another one.

Final words

I think it is a bit less visually appealing but on the other hand, a lot of technical blogs are not. Does it have to be? I am not sure. It is not like I have 10k readers anyway. It mostly is just my public note taker. Anyway so far it is quite nice and I hope I will be able to write a bit more with hugo since I can just use terminal to write new posts!