Hugo Does What Jekyll Can't
The last few weeks have been a total whirlwind in regards to hosting. For years I used Jekyll to build my site and hosted on Netlify. However Jekyll started to have dependency issues and I needed to find a better solution.
I started by biting the bullet with WordPress. I know WordPress inside and out from using at my day job. There’s a service and attention cost to running a platform like WordPress. It needs to be constantly running so a good PHP/SQL server is recommended and these aren’t cheap.
Plugins also have to be constantly babysat. Sometimes I visit a client’s website after a few months and there’s more than a 20 plugins that need to be updated. That seems like a big waste of energy. It’s weird that a site powered by WordPress can suddenly break by not being able to be updated. A good website you should build it once and not think about it till next time you want to add content.
Finally Learning Hugo
I put off learning Hugo for a very long time. There was some logic things that kind of escaped me compared to Jekyll.
Two resources made it easier for me to jump in and understand how to build Hugo.
Hugo Starter Theme
This theme is created by Eric Murphy and it’s a bare Bones jumping point. It can be used to make a multitude of different types of themes.
Lugo
Created by Luke Smith this is a template this designed to be modified but it also works as an excellent educational base.
Between these two videos I learned a lot about the inner workings of Hugo. This also helped me learn how to manipulate themes that I pull from the Hugo theme library.
Moving to Cloudflare Pages
After spending a lot of time on Netlify I’ve decided to try out cloudflare pages. Cloudflare, is a kind of controversial service. However they have one of the largest CDN networks in the world. Cloudflare Pages is powered by that CDN.
Outside of the controversy, I do find their approach to continuous deployment to be a lot faster than Netlify.
What’s Next?
Currently I’m using a theme that I found on the gallery. It works really nice and I’ve customized it quite a bit. Eventually though, I would like to build a completely original theme from scratch. I’m a bit of a control freak like that.
Maybe now I can stop making posts excusing my long periods of inactivity or talking about hosting infrastructure.