Introduction#
If you have been here before, you will have noticed some changes. Previously, everything I posted was on sport-touring.eu and hosted by a WordPress site locally. This is no longer the case.
Why the changes?#
First and foremost, WordPress was giving me headaches. While it is an impressive suite, it is also a bit fragile at times. Recently, I was getting errors wanting to click to articles and couldn’t really find what was wrong. Granted, I didn’t look very long, but still. It shouldn’t been happening as nothing changed.
Now what?#
A while back, I had heard of Hugo. I didn’t do much with it, just installed it and played around with it shortly. It looked interesting enough, but I didn’t know enough Markdown formatting to be really useful with it.
What is Hugo?#
Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators. With its amazing speed and flexibility, Hugo makes building websites fun again.
This is direct quote from their website. And that is exactly it.
Ok…#
Hugo does have a bit of a learning curve, as you need to write your content in Markdown. But it is editing in flat text format. When you are done, you just run Hugo and it will generate static html pages for your entire site, resulting in a blazing fast experience and no bloat.
Having said that, it does make things easier and takes the complexity out of your site without having to sacrifice features or looks. There are plenty of themes you can install and modify and when you have the look that you want, you don’t have to touch it anymore. It just gets rendered with your content.
Also, hosting has changed. Previously my site was running on my NAS. That’s perfectly fine. I have 1Gbit/1Gbit connection and reliable storage. Then again, Hugo let’s me integrate with github. Not just for version control, but you can make use of github actions (github even has a default action for Hugo), that let’s you bring your site live, on github, after commit. Even with a custom domain. Pretty darn cool if you ask me. And Hugo let’s you preview your site in your browser locally, so you can just work on it and only commit when you are happy. So I moved of my NAS and onto github for my sites so i can edit whereever I am, whenever.
Conclusion#
So that’s it. Back to plain old html, no fuss and automated deployments. I do still have a lot to learn, but that is just part of the fun. I hope you are enjoying the content as much as I am working on it.