Hugo migration experiences

(Updated: )
1 minute read
Thoughts
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The goal was to switch to hugo as a static blogging engine. My reasons were:

  • super easy hosting (planned was S3 & CloudFront, it is now Netlify - which is insanely easy and I don’t need my homepage-builder image any longer)
  • no database any more, everything in git, including git push deployments
  • super quick page loads

While trying this I found a couple of drawbacks, mainly …

  • way less themes than Wordpress (well, big surprise), in by far not the same quality
  • theme switching is, if it gets improved a lot, still a PITA (right now let’s just not talk about it)
  • it is insanely hard to debug your page if something does not work
  • currently no comment engine

It is a double-edged sword. During the migration process I often wished for a quick WYSIWYG “new blog post” editor like in Wordpress, at the same time I loved the security git gave me - it’s nearly impossible to lose images, posts, whatever in your blog, it will always be “somewhere” in git. But there are already ways to get around that (it seems forestry.io is exactly that).

So, here we are now. The state is:

  • currently, no comments available
    • cause I hate ads and don’t want to introduce ad-supported Disqus, and I also don’t want to pay for it
    • the plan is to add a self-hosted commenting engine though
  • all posts transferred, including all images (as far as I can tell)
  • a somewhat final theme (50:50 that this will be changed again)

… and all of this took WAY longer that I expected.