Moved to Hugo

Mar 9, 2023 news

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

I just moved from Jekyll and Github pages to Hugo and Netlify. And made a new design. It’s overall much better - but with a few things to note.

The Positives

First of all, it’s much faster to compile. Granted, locally I was using Docker and Jekyll, so there was a little overhead there. But still, it went from about 30 seconds to compile 650 pages - to just about 1.5 seconds.

Next, I really like the shortcode functionality in Hugo. It allows you to put snippets of either plain HTML or full-functional components into your markdown files.

Finally, the new design I created focuses on more of my wholistic work - and not just on being a programmer. My programming work is directly still marketed on More Better Faster.

The Negatives

It took days of work between scripting and manual work to convert all of my content. There was a lot more logic I was doing in the Jekyll templates. I tried to follow the ‘rules’ with my Hugo installation.

Sadly, some of the RSS feed locations have changed. It used to be:

https://aaronsaray.com/tag/laravel.xml

And now it’s:

https://aaronsaray.com/tag/laravel/index.xml

Also, the main blog feed used to be at /feed.xml and now it’s at /blog/index.xml. But, I did put a redirect in Netlify for this.

Final Thoughts

I’m still learning Hugo - but I’m enjoying the quickness and ease of use. I think this was a good change!