After a few years of blogging using Jekyll it began to lose its lustre. I think that’s had a knock on effect in my desire to create new content so I started looking for something new. It didn’t take long before finding Hugo which piqued my interest because it’s written in Go, a programming language which boasts the following attributes:
- strongly typed
- goroutines(concurrent functions)
- concise
- built in HTML templating support
- incredibly portable so all depenencies and code can be packaged as a binary
- excellent documentation
Because of all these things, Go seems a perfect match for creating site generator, and as soon as I copied across my Markdown based posts in to the directory that Hugo had set up, barring a few content tweaks my expectations were surpassed! Site builds now take fractions of a second and I’m certainly not going to miss having to install and set up Ruby, Bundler and Ruby Gems on any new machines in the future.
I also used this as an opportunity to revisit the hosting of my blog, which
previously sat in Amazon S3 behind Cloudfront using the s3_website
gem. I’d heard good things about
Netlify and within minutes I was set up and off to
the races. Publishing an update to my live blog is as simple as running git push origin master in to my GitHub repository and Netlify takes care of the
rest - happy days!