I quit Jekyll today. Not a really huge decision to make, the blog is really small at this point. I could convert all metadata and all by hand. That was before I knew that Hugo has some tools to ease the switch.

So long Jekyll

I got tired of Jekyll for two reasons. The first is that I had a lot of stuff to install before being able to serve and test my website. The second is that it is a hell to maintain a blog with it. The last post I wrote (here) was published with Jekyll. That was before I upgraded to El Capitan. All hell went lose after that. Some dependencies were upgraded too, and stuff I’ve done four months ago were to be done again. I don’t have a clue about the Ruby ecosystem, and I’m not particularly interested in learning it. I know it is really simple, but I don’t have the time nor the motivation to.

Hi Hugo

I chosed Hugo for two reasons. The first is that I had great experiences with tools written in Go recently, mainly fzf and pt. I had taken a look at cli when I was looking for a simple way to write a command line app¹, and it looked dead simple. Go-based tools seems to have a “keep it simple stupid” spirit that appeals to me very much. The second reason is that Hugo has an awesome website and documentation that makes it really easy to have a quick overview of what it can do.

Since I don’t need really complex stuff to be done in a simple blog, I thought Hugo was a great choice. Its speed was the icing on the cake. I tend to think that I don’t need it. But when you have it, you don’t look back. Same goes for ag.

To deploy the website to GitHub Pages, simply git init in the public directory, and git remote add your repo URL. GitHub Pages are generated at super speed. This is really simple.

I would definitely recommend Hugo to anybody wanting to start a blog. I find it really simple to use, much more than Jekyll. And it has great themes.