Switching to Hugo

This blog has been dormant since I joined SUSE 8 years ago, although I wanted to get back to blogging for quite some time. After changing jobs, at first I simply had too much other tasks to take care of. Later when things settled down a bit, my Jekyll installation was obsolete to a point that it wasn’t usable any longer.

Jekyll has always been a bit of pain to work with. Any updates to the Ruby installation risked breaking some of Jekyll’s dependencies. Any updates to the system risked breaking Ruby itself. Whenever I tried to come back to writing, I found something was not working in my Jekyll installation. Most recently, Ruby’s Bundler installer either failed to set up a user-local installation or wanted to mess around with my Linux’ system libraries. Building Ruby’s BigDecimal module didn’t work at all. So it appeared as if I’d have to move up from mere user to Ruby developer to keep using Jekyll.

As this was not an option, I decided to convert the site to another generator. There are plenty to choose from and Hugo seemed like a good choice. It is light-weight and supports Markdown for writing. In contrast to Jekyll, it appears to be a single core program with less fragile dependencies.

The conversion still was painful. Hugo’s documentation is there; to put it in friendly terms. I found it, however, insufficient for beginners. It took me literally hours to figure how to make links work correctly or how to get data onto the final website. (Data goes into static/, not assets/.) I found the book blogdown by Xie, Thomas and Hill really helpful. The authors seem to considers it out-of-date, but it was still the best guide I could find. When setting up the site’s Atom feed, I loosely followed the description at dmvrtx.me.

After getting through the initial learning curve, things got better. I had to fix up the permalinks, adapt some of the syntax and do little changes here and there. It was also a good opportunity to weed out the last remaining JS scripts and external resources. The website should now be self-contained.

For the theme, I forked from Etch by Lukas Joswiak and applied significant modifications to page layout, fonts and page features. The original Etch is available under MIT license.

With everything in place, the resulting website is quite nice, I think. Hopefully I get back to blogging more often.