If you’ve visited this site in the past, you’ve probably noticed a change. I recently changed my blogging platform from WordPress to Hugo. Hugo is static site generator. I also changed my theme.
Why?
I was never really satisfied with the performance of my WordPress site. Combine that with the fact that my site kept going down every month, I decided that it was time to do something and be more in control.
I like Markdown very much and wanted something that supported writing posts in Markdown (and enable me to write in wonderful writing tools like Bear and Ulysses). I also wanted something fast that didn’t require me to install an entire development platform just to write a post. Hugo was really the only generator that satisfied all those constraints.
I also changed my blog host from Bluehost.com to Github pages. I trust Github to stay up more than I do Bluehost, but I think the real culprit to my site going down regularly was WordPress.
The Process
First, I found blog2md, a script that that converted all my WordPress posts to Markdown. Then, I exported all my images from WordPress, put them in the proper place, and then tweak all my posts so they had the right image URLs .
After that it was choosing a theme, tweaking it to me liking (changing colors, adding some links, configuring options), updating the DNS to point to Github, and I was done. The whole process took about a week.
The Results
I’m really happy with the results. The site is much faster and easier to maintain. All I need is my Markdown editor to write a post. Once the post is ready, I simply tell Hugo to generate the site and then push it up to the GitHub repo