Moved to Hugo

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!