For a while now I’ve been wanting to move my blog from Ghost over to something that is statically generated. But now that I’ve been locked out of my blog server for some odd reason, I’ve decided this is a good opportunity to give a static site generator a shot.
Some of the options I’ve contemplated include Pelican, Jekyll, Hexo, and Hugo, all of which I’ve had experience with to some degree. Pelican was knocked off my list almost immediately since it had some limitations such as having no built-in web server to preview changes. Jekyll is alright but I’m not really in the mood to set up rbenv and the like to run it. Hexo has some strange issues with how it parses Markdown so it’s gone as well. That leaves me with Hugo.
Compared to the others, Hugo is written in Go which means it can be shipped as a native executable. This obviously means that it is pretty light on dependencies, which is nice. I’ve also had great experience with it in the past and others I’ve talked to have said the same thing, so I’m giving it another shot this time around.
Also I don’t have to worry as much about keeping the site up to date since I’m not running a database and a NodeJS app. Nice.