Blogging with Hugo

When I was starting with my engineering journey some years ago, soon after reading some blog posts here and there, I was convinced that having a blog was a positive sign of being a good engineer. Without knowing so much about ins and outs at that time, a friend helped me to get my own blog started with Wordpress on shared hosting at Turhost.

At the beginning, I was all excited and started to write blog posts often. Afterwards, I got bored, did not have patient, had long breaks and not so good at customizing and manintaing Wordpress. Even though I tried to be regular with blogging a few times, I could not keep up with that.

Meanwhile, I had learned that I was not able to do much with hosting that I paid. I got refused everytime for what I wanted to do because it was shared hosting. Recently, I found out about Hugo, Github Pages and other things. I thought to myself that I do not like spending time playing with Wordpress, and not able to do anything with the server, then why am I paying each year?

I decided to go with Hugo. So I was just gonna pay for the domain. I did not want to give up on the content on the Wordpress. I did as follows:

hugo import jekyll jekyll-extracted-content new-blog
cd new-blog
# it has to be added as submodule if you want to use netlify
git submodule add https://github.com/spf13/hyde.git themes/

It was all easy breezy, not much of a headache. I am happy that I did not have to give up on my Wordpress content, I do not have to pay for wasteful hosting, I do not have to maintain deployment(Netlify does all). I am just going to open up my favorite editor Vim and my favorite way of writing in Markdown, then push it to Github repo.

There might be problems with migration of Wordpress, that I may realize later on, but it is okay. On the first look, it does not look so bad. The Hyde theme that I currently use is not customized in any way. I believe in time I can invest a little more and more on learning Hugo’s ins and outs.

All in all, I can say that it is a refreshing start for the new year. From now on, it should be easier for me write a blog post once in a while if I can keep my thoughts on the point.