Why I Moved To Hugo For My Blog
You might have noticed my blog's had a bit of spring clean. The new site is powered by a static site generator called Hugo, which is written in the loveable Go language. I also finally moved off of shared hosting (don't ask...) to a Digital Ocean server which also provides me a host of other freedoms.
My previous site was a custom site I wrote using PHP + MySQL over the years. It worked well as a platform for learning and functionality it worked reasonably well also. However for the following reasons I knew this needed to end:
- Updating posts; I wanted to be able to quickly whip up a post or modify an old one.
- Security issues; trying patch years of sub optimal PHP code against would be nuisancers was not a task I was feeling up to.
- SSL; I wanted (still need to) setup and enable HTTPS using Let's Encrypt. A weekend task me thinks!
- Lack of RSS feed; Hugo comes with an RSS feed generator built in.
- Querying and retrieving from a database is generally going to be slower than transfering static pages.
- Commenting and Permalinking; my previous implemented solutions were not robust enough.
- Hugo is easy to theme. I went with a modified version of purehugo.
- Hugo has lots of extra niceties including tagging, support for disqus etc.
So yeah, that's pretty much the major reasons. I hope you like the new makeover, and I'll be looking to be making some (more interesting) blog posts soon.
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