Almost twelve years ago I moved away from writing static Web pages and toward setting up a local WordPress installation on my Web host and adding new content in it. It has worked well, but maintaining a WordPress installation involves a lot of extra effort with updating the main WordPress installation along with its themes and plugins. Fortunately, some of these updates have been automated in recent years and the use of another plugin called Wordfence has helped ease the annoyance. Still, the continuous login attempts from those trying to drop spam into the comments and so on and other annoyances led me to start looking elsewhere and I discovered Hugo.
Hugo is a static site generator which means that it takes my content written in the simple Markdown format and converts it into HTML with CSS for proper Web page formatting. The result, along with any images and other media files, are uploaded to the Web host and served as static Web pages. In other words, what is uploaded is what is served. Neither the Web host nor a scripting language modifies the content along the way.
Unlike WordPress, the Hugo generated blog does not rely on a database nor the PHP Web scripting language which is notorious for security issues. There is no “logging into the blog” now and the pages served are generated on my local computer and uploaded via Secure FTP. There is no built-in comment system and at this time I’m only including those comments that existed in the WordPress installation and the few I added as I performed the content conversion. I am undecided if I will add comments or not as there are a few methods available. Should a reader really want to submit a comment my email address can be found elsewhere and I’ll add it manually should I deem it worthy.
Of course, things not being a one-to-one conversion, there are differences in the WordPress theme I used and the one I have chosen for Hugo. Over time I should learn more about the way Hugo themes are implemented and customize it more to my liking. The theme I am working with is called Puppet.
Hopefully, as I get more comfortable with generating the site in Hugo and since I’ll be able to author posts in my favorite text editor (Vim), more timely content should appear. Well, I hope so, anyway.
Every effort was made to make sure that all permanent links to the blog posts were preserved. Of course, it’s always possible that some errors have crept in. If such are found, an email showing the incorrect link will be appreciated.