Migrating to Hugo

A bit over two years ago I blogged about migrating to Octopress from Wordpress, this time I'll blog about migrating to Hugo from Octopress.

I started messing around with Hugo because I was experimenting with Go and wanted to take a look at a simple and complete Go project. I ended up liking the simplicity of setting up a new site and decided to try porting my blog to it.

I really liked the original Octopress theme and I've done a number of modifications to it. Some were simple CSS color changes, others were about removing any external dependencies, e.g., Jquery and Google fonts. Thus, it was important to me that I can find a similar theme for Hugo. Thankfully, Parsia Hakimian had already ported the original Octopress theme toHugo. A couple of public edits later -plus some private ones- and I had everything setup just the way I like it!

Migrating my old posts was a breeze, I didn't end up using the import jekyll command, instead I used a bit of zsh and sed magic. Unfortunately, I did this a couple of months ago and it's long gone from my shell history. Moving the static content was just a cp away.

What I didn't notice at the time of the migration, was that Octopress by default (I think), uses only the first four words of a post's title to create the URL for it. Hugo uses all of them, thus I ended up with a couple of posts with different URLs. I noticed this a bit late and was too bored to fix it ASAP. Either way, a couple of days later Google had updated its search results and contained the new URLs. I know and care about linkrot, but I cba to fix it at the moment.

All in all, it was a simple and fast migration and I find the end result clean and simple. I enjoy not having to mess around with a Rakefile, or worrying about if a git pull on the upstream project will mess up everything.

If you're looking for a simple and easily extensible static site generator, give Hugo a try.