Transitioning from Wordpress to Hugo

I have, for the past few years, run a little personal blog on Wordpress called “Getting Out There”. Over the years I’ve hosted it at different hosts and domains, and added to it much the same as one might build extra rooms to a renovated house. I’ve run a little WooCommerce, added GravityForms and custom post types and photos and before you know it, the bloat is very, very real. With that bloat comes more hosting costs, which for a little personal blog that I am certain nobody reads, is unsustainable.

Here’s the catch: I love Wordpress. I’ve developed Wordpress themes from scratch, have built, maintained and then long-forgotten plugins, and have adored how close I was able to blend my loves of back- and front-end web design and development. Some years ago I moved from my own custom theme to one called Impreza, by US Themes. If you need a professional, highly capable and customisable Wordpress theme that just does everything you could possibly need, then Impreza is for you. I have held dozens of licenses for this theme. Adore.

So whilst I recognised the dire need to Marie Kondo my blogI actually really detest the commercial drive behind the craze that is KonMari ruthlessly throwing things away, just to buy some Scandinavian shit to replace it and make your home look like the ones on Instagram. Maybe another blog post for another day… In the meantime, I’m referring to: https://konmari.com/, I still wanted to keep some flash. Additionally, or perhaps most critically, I love the front- and back-end maintenance of my blog as a pleasure in and of itself: whilst in one way I love that you’re reading this — thank you for honouring me with your presence, Esteemed Guest 🙏 🙇‍♂️ — I truly do not care if anybody reads my blog at all. I like having somewhere to drop my thoughts, collect my adventures, post some photos, and provide a web geek’s playground.

So I started to look at a SSG. If you don’t know what a SSG is, I have two suppositions to make:

1. You should go Google that.
2. You may not actually be that interested in this post. You’ve been warned. 😆

I have yet to delve professionally into static site “JAMstacks”, the tech I use at work utilises them but I’ve never configured or set it up myself. I decided to have a crack at Hugo after reading a few subreddits and declaring myself familiar with what Hugo has to offer. I also took a look at a few different frameworks for the CSS, as I decided at the outset not to use a theme. I’m doin’ this meself.

The key criteria I have for the technologies I’ve considered are:

1. It must be open source.
2. No cookies or invasions of my readers’ privacy. You’re welcome.
3. No over-reliance on one particular platform.

   • For example, I do not want to maintain huge package.json files due to every framework’s answer being:

     npm install this-small-two-lines-of-code-plugin
     

   • No, I won’t just npm it. First tell me: “Why?!”

   • Of course, building something “on Hugo and TailwindCSS” means the platform is a key integrated component, but I want to be able to move my content elsewhere when I inevitably bore of Hugo and move to the next thing. I am a fickle bastard.

4. That said above, no stupid abstractions or religious adherence to DRY principles.
   • Some things in my site are hard-coded and definitely not content-agnostic. Why? It’s easier. I can always re-do the copyright notice in the next site I build.
   • The answer to every question is not always a huge YAML file and another layer of the stack.
   • DRY has kept food on many a developer’s table, much as lawyers adore complainants fighting a case on “the principle of the thing”.

In the end, I decided upon the following:

• Hugo to generate the site.
• TailwindCSS to generate the CSS.
• Gulp to handle the Javascript, SVG and any SCSS that isn’t Tailwind.
• Git for version control.
  • One main repository for the site code and logic.
  • Another repository as a git submodule for the content.
• Gitea for hosting my git repository. Self-hosting my git repository on an instance of Charm’s Soft Serve.
• DroneCI for building “production Hugo”. I built a little Raspberry Pi-powered single board computer to build my Hugo site when not at my desk (i.e. on the bike, at work, travelling, etc…).
• A DigitalOcean droplet for hosting the files. I’m aware I can use cheaper GitHub Pages et al. but I both don’t mind paying for the occasional bit of hosting and importantly: I may want to add some dynamic elements (such as PHP forms, et cetera) at a later date. No stupid abstractions, remember?

Attributions

The following works, images or designs were not created by me:

• Rendered image of pill with Hugo and Wordpress logos from Kim Lehtinen's blog. Used here without permission. Funnily enough, Kim writes of the opposite transition. Go read their blog!