An update
I haven’t blogged for quite a while. Social media (Twitter, Facebook &c.) seemed like it had replaced blogging for the purposes I used it for. Also, I hadn’t been able to log in to my Wordpress installation for quite a while, and I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to fix the problem.
Separately, one of the bloggers I follow on Twitter, Raymond Camden, recently ported his own blog to Hugo, a static site generator written in the Go programming language. Despite having built a career on building database-driven web sites and applications, and having been a long-term Wordpress user and advocate, I decided to follow Ray’s lead.
I admit I am a bit of a sucker (a magpie, even) for new web technologies and approaches. Although Hugo is a relatively new website platform, its approach (Markdown source files built out to a set of flat HTML files) is decidedly old-school. Flat pages served up by a web server like Apache are, however, decidedly speedy, with no database connections or query overhead.
So, with a Wordpress blog in an enforced state of being mothballed, and a desire to learn something new, I set about porting my content. With a full export file of the Wordpress blog posts and comments, I used a script to convert this to the Jekyll static site structure, then a second script to convert from Jekyll to Hugo format.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Hugo can do, but it feels good to be writing on the open web again, after far too long in the walled garden of Facebook.