Moving to Hugo

Fri, Mar 18, 2016

After using Metalsmith as my previous blog engine I decided to move to Hugo.

I previously used Metalsmith for the large amount of flexibility and the fact I could easily write new additions to my site.

The downside is that it is time consuming to get right. I spent a bit of time on it, then somewhat stopped. I never got the theming fully finished, or RSS support integrated.

Hugo comes with everything fully configured out of the box. I was able to drop my markdown files into the content folder and generated a new site with no trouble.

So far I have been very happy with this, and can imagine a lot of improvements to the way I generate this site.

I still use github to store the content for my site, rebuild with travis and push all the content to a S3 bucket that I serve out of.

In the future I would love to put CloudFront with a LetsEncrypt certificate in front of the S3 bucket. I’ll also look into using a Lambda such as this one to generate the site. Eventually I should be able to create a simple admin page that can write to the S3 bucket and regenerate the site.

Still, until then, the new theme and functionality has been a great improvement over my old site.