I Switched to HUGO

So, you might notice something a bit changed around here. For the last several months, I’ve been using Ghost since April, and I’ve liked it. It is very robust, has lots of features, and is very easy to use and maintain. It is also very easy to write in.

But, there has been a bug in my ear almost since the beginning. I use HUGO on my main site for The Linux Cast, and I love it. It’s so easy to write in, since I can just pop into vim and then push the changes to GitLab. There’s no browser interaction at all. Just writing. I’m also much more comfortable in writing inside Vim for some reason. So, there has been a big part of me that has wanted to switch to HUGO on this blog since I switched to Ghost. I’ve even talked about how I should have just used HUGO to begin with.

Yesterday, I put up my website for my History channel. I’m still working on that. It’s slow progress, but the first video is up, and now the website is starting to take shape. For that, I ended up using HUGO. It was easy and fun, and everything I wanted out of a blog setup. It made me really dissatisfied with Ghost, even though that has been treating me very well. I just prefer this way of doing things.

For one thing, I can get rid of my VPS or do something else with it. I can also write in complete Markdown now, whereas with Ghost it was mostly WYSIWYG (though you could use Markdown too). And I will have more control over the theme. The themes on Ghost are more locked down that those on HUGO, or at least so it seemed to me.

So, because of all that, I’ve spent the last few hours getting this blog transferred over to HUGO. It was both easy and hard. The initial transfer was easy enough. I wrote a python script to parse the json export from Ghost in order to get my posts in Markdown format (I have noticed some flaws in that, if you go to the last few pages, there are some obvious errors that I will need to fix). Then I got the GitLab Page set up, and the DNS transferred over.

The hardest part was the theme, honestly. I had forgotten how to use git submodules, and that led to some pain. Once I figured it out again, it was pretty easy. I found a theme I like, though it is more complicated than the Ghost theme I was using, and I’ve spent some time getting things around.

So What Will Change?

Nothing for you. All my content is here. The links should all work on site, at least. Anything I shared out will likely not work, but not much I can do about that. I will spend time over the next few days getting those json errors fixed in the earlier posts and getting images back where they need to be. I’m sure I’ll also get the theme set up completely, though that will take some time.

I’ll also finally settle on a commenting system. I’m not sure where I will go, but Chirpy wasn’t good enough. Too much friction. I know I’ve moved between commenting systems a lot, and that has broken some trust, but I’m looking for something good, and I’ve just not found it yet.

Anyway, Goodbye Ghost, Hello Hugo.