Hello, Hugo!

Back when I started this blog I used a custom written python script to generate the static html from markdown files. At the time I did this for two reasons. First, none of the static site generators I tried clicked for me, and second, it was fun. Which is as much reason as you need in my opinion. At some I wanted to add modern image optimazations with the picture element . Doing this with python could be done, but seemed like more trouble then it was worth. So I decided to take another look at Hugo.

I started by doing the quick start on the hugo website. I switched to exploring on my own as soon as I got something working.

I liked the look of the paper-mod theme. I restructured the markdown files to what hugo expects to get it working, but after playing around I decided there were too many features I would not need. That’s why I set off to write my own theme based on water.css .

For the image generation I used one I found online and modified it for my purposes. The last change I made was to upload the generated site to the vps with rsync instead of scp, for the speed improvement. The only thing I might want to do in the future is switch to the hugo-bearblog theme .

I switched to Hugo months ago at this point, and I am happy with it. I’m glad I took the time to understand it (enough) to work with it. At the same time I don’t regret first writing my own script. I now have a better understanding of what hugo is actually doing when it generates the html.