New Blog Engine: Hugo
Nearly a year ago I started to sour on WordPress, the blog engine I’ve been using since 2007. I have thought for a long time that a plaintext based system would be better, easier to manage, and that I could do more remotely (ie offline) with such a system.
At the time I looked around and the best option I saw was ikiwiki. For what it’s worth, as with pretty much any blog engine it can be themed to be pretty, and it has a ton of plugins, and hey, it’s written in perl, so I could hack on it if need be.
I hacked on my conversion script for a long time, totalling in nearly a year, on and off of course. Part of the problem is that WordPress uses a mixture of HTML and plain text formatting. For example, newlines are converted to linebreaks, some characters are autoescaped for you, and sometimes you get to write raw HTML. I leveraged an existing wiki conversion framework after doing some preprocessing of the above.
I was about ready to pull the trigger about a week ago (March 7, 2014) but I was frustrated that rebuilding my blog of about 300 posts took between thirty seconds and a full minute, depending on settings. I went to bed that night a little frustrated, but as I was reading I had the idea of a Go based static site generator, which could be fast, modern, easily distributable, etc. Before falling asleep I did a quick Google and found Hugo.
🔗 Enter Hugo
Hugo is relatively young at this point. The first commit was just over eight months ago (September 4th, 2013.) The documentation is pretty good, and as expected (and indeed promised) it’s blazing fast. I can regenerate my entire blog in less than half a second. That’s two orders of magnitude faster than ikiwiki was!
Currently Hugo lacks a few features I’d like to have. One of them, Pagination, is acknowledged by Steve Francia, the main developer. If I can level up my Go I’ll see about helping out with that feature, but I’m not super hopeful at this point (I’m not good at Go at all.) I can live with this because I have an alternate, ghetto index of my site via the tags. I can live with that for the time being.
The other feature, which I don’t need but which seems like kindav a no-brainer to me, is more index customizability. I’d love to have a paginated root node, but then also some kind of easy view of all the posts ever, so just a page with a huge list of links. Additionally, if I wanted to generate a google sitemap or two different feeds (RSS and Atom?) this feature is a must.
I mentioned this on the list but got warnocked. Not a huge deal, I can live without that kind of thing probably indefinately.
🔗 Whence Comments?
ikiwiki has a built in commenting system using cgi which, while I find it a little gross, is certainly functional. Part of my original conversion was to convert comments, but with hugo I’d have to somehow manually mash the comments into the posts. I was recommended to just go straight to Disqus for comments since they can apparently import wordpress comments already. So when I get another few hours and interest I’ll go ahead and do that, but I’m not in a huge rush. Generally comments are a wasteland, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid success and thus have not really gotten attention from anyone too negative.
I hope that I can bring myself to post more often like the good old days of 2009, with the blog being so incredibly easy to post to. Enjoy!
I’m not sure what would be the best thing to read along with a post like this. I am torn between two topics: technical, and writing.
(The following includes affiliate links.)
For writing, you could pick a worse starting point than
The Elements of Style
As for the technical aspect, I dearly love
The UNIX Programming Environment
If you're interested in being notified when new posts are published, you can subscribe here; you'll get an email once a week at the most.