Static site generators have picked up a lot of steam in the past few years. This much neglected blog of mine was running WordPress up until now, and even though it was good enough for me (let’s face it, I wasn’t really doing much with my blog anyway), I wanted to play around with SSGs. The ultimate trigger for me was my host telling me that I’m running out on disk space, and needed to decide if I wanted to go to the next tier of hosting with them. I decided that I had had enough with WordPress, and started looking at alternate ways to host this blog. At first, I looked at Ghost, and even though it was very fancy and easy to use, it was overkill for me, and I really wanted to go database-less. Out of all the SSGs I looked at, I decided to use Hugo for the following reasons:

  • It supports Markdown, which is more than enough for my needs.
  • I could set up a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub and DigitalOcean, and host it for FREE as a Digital Ocean App.
  • I didn’t have to self host it. Even though I could do it, I didn’t want to expose myself to unnecessary risk, and I don’t have to worry about uptime.
  • I don’t need to worry about Backups. All my content is on GitHub, properly versioned.

So here we are. My blog running on Hugo. In order to keep the blogging momentum going, I’ll do a post about the whole process of migrating from WordPress, and setting up the CI/CD pipeline in the future. So stay tuned 😁