New Site, Who Dis?

Static site generators

Static site generators are sweet. You input two things, a template (Go text/template-formatted files) and content (arbitrary md files) and it outputs a bunch of html files you can just throw on a filesystem somewhere. I’m oversimplifying a bit, there’s a lot more but whatever.

Over the last decade, I’ve given a lot of static site generators a go. Gatsby, Jekyll, Vuepress.

I was (and am) really excited about Vitepress .

But ultimately, I always land on Hugo as my go-to static site generator. Why?

Hugo is mature

Yes, it’s fun to use the latest and greatest tooling. I would love to use Vitepress and have all my templates be Vue SFC’s.

But it’s young and the community isn’t there yet. There’s limited templates, plugins and support.

It’s absurd how many good Hugo themes are out there, ready for you to start hacking up.

For a project that you really want to, or need to complete, choose the most mature option. Your AI model will probably understand it better, too.

I migrated my wife’s website from Squarespace to GitHub Pages, generated with Hugo. I needed to finish her site at a specific date. Hugo got the job done quickly.

Hugo isn’t perfect

Some premade themes don’t handle relative URLs correctly and it can create frustration when trying to deploy your site at a directory, like alectrocute.github.io/bar/ . Search the web for keywords like hugo relURL and hugo baseURL for more reading.

Hugo, hugo, hugo

The site you’re on was generated using it. I pay $0 a month to host it on Cloudflare Pages. It redeploys automatically when I make changes.

Anyway, enough about Hugo. What have you been up to lately?