Why I Chose Hugo

where I answer from questions from Albert

beppu

2 minute read

Why did you pick hugo (and Go) instead of github’s jekyll?

I was initially going to use Jekyll, but when I tried to do a bundle install, one of the dependencies failed to install. I didn’t feel like fighting that battle, so I decided to try Hugo instead since I had looked at it in the past.

What I liked about Hugo was that:

  • it was fast,
  • it had a nice selection of themes,
  • its blogging functionality was adequate.

As for Go, it wasn’t a major factor in choosing a static site generator for me.

How proficient you need to be in Go to use Hugo?

You don’t need to know Go at all, and I haven’t even looked at a line of Hugo’s Go code yet.

However, what you do need is some proficiency with the Unix shell so that you can run the various hugo commands and navigate the directory structure it generates for you.

It’s also helpful for when things go wrong and you need to debug. For example, this theme that I’m using was slightly buggy out of the box, and I had to move some files around to make it work.

Did you try other static site generators?

I did go over to https://www.staticgen.com/ and look over the list. I remembered that Hugo was one of the ones you liked, so I gave that a try first, and I liked it. Thus, the search ended rather quickly.

Your thoughts on storing comments on your own

(it’d probably require a dynamic site, though I saw some weird IMAP tricks with Pelican a while ago) vs using something like Disqus.

On blogs where the topic matter makes censorship unlikely, I don’t mind delegating comments to a system like Disqus. If I were running a blog with political commentary, I would definitely want to handle comments locally, though.

To be honest, I was actually surprised when I saw the Disqus comment widget when I published it to GitHub, because they didn’t show up at all while I was developing the site locally. It’s using someone else’s generic Disqus forum and not one that I set up myself.

I should probably fix that.

I fixed it – I have my own disqus forum now.

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