Hugo
Hurray, this website has endured and survived another change in backend! This time, I’ve switched from Gostatic to Hugo. Initially a piece of PHP which I’ve forgotten the name of, later Wordpress, then Nanoc, Gostatic, Jekyll, Gostatic again and now Hugo. The hardest part is always my archive page, which lists all pages and tags and pages in each of those tags. For some reason most blog software wants to generate separate pages for tags… Yuk.
It was relatively simple, since there was no changed in templating language, but there was some getting acquinted with Hugo-isms. Why did I do this? I like Gostatic because it is quite simple and compact, and I’ve even submitted a PR in the past. I switched because I’m writing a new website and since I’m not very good at that, I like to steal themes to save some time. Tools with larger userbases tend to have large numbers of themes, tooling, examples, etc., and Hugo seems to have gotten quite big in the past few years. On Jamstack they’re number 1 (I wanted to stick to a tool written in Go or Python) and for that other website I could find a theme of my liking for Hugo. Setting that up was rather pleasant, so I thought I’d switch too!
In technical terms Hugo seems to be quite flexible and has every feature I wanted (and more). Also: available on pip, and therefore executable on Macos where admins have locked app exercution to notarized executables (Apple’s python obviously is greenlighted).
Another interesting thing I’ve discovered is that Netlify, the place I host my websites, now has drag’n’drop deploy. Wait! That sounds terrible, but it isn’t! You can just drop a single zip file of your website on the browser, and have it ‘deployed’. I only every used their git integration (which is still there) because I don’t want to use their own CLI. It’s nice to be able to generate a site locally and still be able to deploy without any special tools or complicated procedures. Executing Hugo, creating the zip can be scripted, and a nonexpert can be instructed to doubleclick that script and drag and drop the zip if they have updated something. Much better than going through git.
So, as of this post, this website is coming to you through a zipball!