If you’re seeing this, this site is now running with Hugo.
When I first started using Github Pages, I used Jekyll as a static site generator. It had the advantage of being very easy to get up and running: just create a repo in which you put the markdown files you want to turn into web pages, with other eventual raw HTML you might have, commit, push, and voila, you have a working website.
That being said, while getting Jekyll to work on the Github Pages remote which publishes the site is super easy, getting it to work on my machines so that I can properly see whatever changes I make to the site isn’t that easy. My experience with setting up Ruby on my machines has always been a really painful one, having to fight error after error, and as someone who doesn’t use Ruby anywhere else, this is not what I want to go through to see my changes in my blogs. This experience just makes me want to stay away from using Ruby to make apps, I don’t like it at all.
Maybe I’m just too dumb to use Ruby and its apps, but I just don’t like having to set it up. So I tried to look for other static site generators that don’t make me install all sorts of dubious runtimes and dependencies, and I found 2 viable alternatives: Zola and Hugo - both written in statically compiled languages (the opposite of dubious runtimes and dependencies - that’s pretty cool 😎).
I ended up choosing Hugo, as I found this theme that I could get configured just the way I wanted my blog to be - yay! While some people on the internet appreciated Zola’s simplicity as opposed to Hugo, I just could not get my way around its simplicity…
I hope this post will not be the only one I post here, I hope to write more stuff here, but I haven’t a good track record on this. Maybe this is an opportunity to start fresh, to have a better plan with this online space… We’ll see.