I’ve been using1 Jekyll to power my personal website for some time. But when building the website for my university’s ACM Branch earlier this year, I ran across Hugo as a similar solution. Given that I knew I would be handing the site off to others, the idea of not needing to wrestle with Ruby and Jekyll’s dependencies was quite attractive. I was hesitant to switch my personal website, as I had put blood, sweat, and tears into my own custom Jekyll theme. So life went on as usual.
Fast forward to today, where I’ve recently switched to a new laptop for work on the go. I wipe most of my devices on a yearly basis, so I’ve mostly got the process of spinning up a “new” box down to a science (perhaps the topic for a future post). I didn’t have cause to do anything with my website until a few days ago, so I hadn’t gotten my environment set up for that particular task. I don’t personally develop with Ruby, so once again I questioned the need to have a full environment set up just to use a static site generator.
And so, I’ve decided to take a leap of faith and start fresh with Hugo. Somewhere down the line I’ll get around to rebuilding my own setup, but at the time of writing I’m using Luiz de Prá’s excellent theme Coder.
Even if updates were dreadfully rare. ↩︎