New Site with Hugo

I started my personal blog at 2015 using Jekyll, but unfortunately dropped the ball. Now I want to pick it up.

However, I feel reluctant to continue using the Jekyll site. Even though Jekyll served me ok with neat default theme and easy integration with Github, it was a bit hard for me to fully understand and customize as I had little knowledge on Ruby.

I want a long-term solution for my site. After some research, I choose Hugo because it is:

• Fully featured
• Widely adopted, and having active community
• Developed in Go, and having good doc (easier for me to learn)
• Fast on build

The experience is good so far.
The quick start guide in official doc worked right away.
Then I learned how to make a hugo site from scratch from this post.
With the basic knowledge, I started to built my site based on a nice theme named Cactus Plus. Some cosmetic adjustments were made to improve the reading experience; some code/performance improvements were done such as refactoring layouts, replacing highligh.js with builtin pygments, and hiding Disqus unless user click “show comments” button.
At last, I hosted the site using Netlify, which was super easy.

Some of my favorites Hugo features are:

• Page bundle, which makes it easy to organize page materials like images
• Built-in support everything I need such as code highlight, toc, word count etc
• Easy local development and fast build

Things I dislike? Nothing really. But one thing I do think the number of high quality theme is still quite limited, even though more and more themes are added. I believe more people would choose Hugo when themes like NexT were onboard to Hugo.

Anyway I believe Hugo is a neat long-term solution for personal blog and I am happy with it.

Last thing to share: The most important thing for a blog is still the content, so it may not worth to spend too much time on comparing all the tools, any tool that you are comfortable with should be good to go. Happy writing!