Moved Site to Hugo
After a long time of using Python & Flask as the base for my site, I’ve switched over to Hugo. My site doesn’t change very often, so this move makes a lot of sense. It’s easier to host and no more Python updates to keep up with.
The move was pretty easy. I created a new Hugo project and copied all my static resources from the old site to the /static directory of my Hugo project. Then I took my Python Jinja2 templates layout and used it for the base of my default layout in Hugo (i.e. baseof.html). I was then able to add content for the pages of my site, and lastly copy over the posts that I wanted to keep.
All-in-all, the thing move took a few hours which isn’t bad for a technology change like this.
There were two parts that were confusing to me and where I lost some time. First, I totally do not get Hugo themes. The docs say to start there, but as someone just getting started with Hugo, there was too much magic happening for me to easily follow. I found it easier starting with my own layout as I could easily see how Hugo was building the pages (i.e. what was combined). Second, while the Hugo docs are a decent reference guide, there’s is not a good tutorial that walks through concepts in the order you need to care about them. As a new user, this definitely made it harder to get started. Searching for help and using an AI assistant worked well though, given that Hugo is pretty popular and there’s a lot of help available.
All-in-all, I’m happy with the change. Now that I have the site set up, it’ll be easy to maintain. Plus, my hosting just got a lot simpler. Hugo generates static files, I’ll push those up to my server and have Nginx host them. Nothing extra to run.