I’ve been wanting to redo my personal site for some time and desired something a bit more involved then a one-pager with my contact details. I was also starting to suspect that my Google search results may be taking a hit since I hosted two of my blogs on subdomains of http://adamogrady.id.au and the similarities in topic, authors, etc might appear spammy to the Google algorithm.

Rather than look towards the high-tech side, I was eventually swayed into trying out a static site generator given their current popularity. With a bevy of choices on the market I eventually settled on Hugo, especially given it’s cross-platform capability, Markdown formatting, inbuilt server with live reload, and it’s customisability. Admittedly it took me a bit to actually step into it, define content types and then develop the templates, styles and migrate the content from my existing blogs. The semantic organisation isn’t so much an issue with the platform as it is with my personal difficulties in nailing down how I want to categorise/separate my posts (but what if the way I’m doing it is wrong and I need to redo it all laterrrrr?!), so don’t hold that against testing out a static site generator (unless that is a problem you commonly face in which case my sympathies go out to you).

Honestly, I’m really enjoying the workflow of this whole shebang. I can write my posts in Markdown - something that I’m familiar with and enjoy - compile the site and push it up to my web host. If anything I’m being incredibly backwards in uploading the compiled site via FTP, I could potentially set up a Git-hook-deploy system here (next on the list I guess).

If you’re on the fence, give Hugo a shot and see how it goes. It may save you some overhead in code interpreters and database queries while not being ungainly to manage. Maybe you’ll even start seeing it as the solution to all your problems in web-development (Hugo can’t create tailored diet and exercise plans for you yet, but it’s in the roadmap for v0.14).