Why I Switched to Hugo

When I planned this blog several eons ago, one goal was to learn React, and since I wanted to write about this adventure, I thought that by building this blog with GatsbyJS* — a React-based static website generator — I’d be able to kill several birds with one stone. Both React and Gatsby are very cool technologies, and there is lots of documentation and tons of tutorials available.

I got the blog off the ground and started to play around with themes and a few plug-ins. It worked reasonably well from a purely technical point of view. The site was hosted on Netlify, and I had a test instance running on CodeAnywhere.

I also have a few virtual servers running at various providers, and I’m already hosting a few blogs. Some of them have been running for years, and they’re all built on Grav CMS — a PHP-based flat-file CMS. I still like Grav, and I’m now used to a particular workflow when writing and publishing content. In fact, at one time, I was also trying to get into creating and customizing Grav plug-ins.

Of course, this was the “old” me who thought that available time was infinite and that planning was for suckers. The “new and improved” me is mature and has come to realize that not only am I a mere mortal but also that my available time is most definitely finite and that I, therefore, should not waste it. Well, the result of all this is that I decided to go with a much simpler solution: this blog is using Hugo and is hosted on a DigitalOcean App Platform. The content and rest of the source code are managed in a GitHub repo.

The content itself is written in Markdown, and with the current setup, I can write posts virtually anywhere and on almost any device as long as I can access the repo.

Now, I don’t feel that my adventures with React and Gatsby were a waste of time. On the contrary, it was time well spent, and I think I learned a lot. The JAMStack is very cool and has a lot of great solutions to various problems, and my time with that project has inspired me to try to make my content publishing process in Hugo a bit more streamlined.

My ultimate goal is to be able to write and publish a post on my phone while waiting in line to board a flight? Will I ever get there? Who knows? But I’ll definitely give it a try!