Switching to Hugo

The time has come to move to a new platform.

Over the years, Wordpress (in various forms) has served reasonably well, but it is a constantly moving target. Since it is SO popular, it must constantly be upgraded, maintained, etc. Both security and performance are significant concerns.

When I first started blogging, it seemed SO COOL to have a dynamic website. But in recent history, it’s just become a hassle.

Enter Hugo and the world of static site generators. It can’t be hacked if it’s just static files, at least, not via SQL injection or PHP bugs. Also, it’s as fast as your CDN of choice.

I found the Wordpress to Hugo Exporter plugin and used that to get my content exported. It MOSTLY worked, though I blame my very old, crufty data more than the plugin, as this website started life as a very hacky raw PHP script.

Since I’d done a lot of weird things with Wordpress over the years (Gallery integration, WP, WP multi-user, etc) I had a lot of weird internal URL references which I also needed to cleanup manually… but that didn’t take too much effort.

For hosting, I’m using Gitlab Pages and Cloudflare CDN for, uh, CDN and also for SSL.

I’m pretty happy writing markdown in Vim… but I’ve also played with Forrestry.io which seems like a decent GUI/WYSIWYG web app for editing online either with single or multiple users.

Not sure I’ll be posting much more often, but at least I have one less Wordpress site to maintain, which may yield more time for writing… :) Yeah right.