Hello Hugo

Requirements

There were a few requirements that I wanted in a site. Nothing crazy

• Either self-host the site or have the hosting cost next to nothing
• Don’t need a lot of bells and whistles (including e-commerce). Less is more.
• Learning curve is alright as long as it’s manageable
• Some-what secure
• No php if possible
• Bonus points for the tinker factor
• Bonus points for Open Source

Choices

Looking around these seemed to be the main ones people use/consider

• WordPress (They-host or Self-host)
• Concrete5 (Self-host)
• Ghost (They-host or Self-host)
• Jekyll (Self-host)*
• Hugo (Self-host)*

Wordpress

They-host is immediately off the table because of $$$. I did spin up their docker image and was playing around with it, but it felt sort of soulless. Also reading online about the amount of vulnerabilities in WordPress sort of made it an easy choice to dump.

Concrete5

I’ve used Concrete5 in my current job and am not a fan of how it’s setup. I’m sure for people who are coming from WordPress and looking for a different option it would be good. But it’s not for me.

Ghost

I spun up the Ghost docker image for v3 and was really liking it. I’ve seen it being used on Linuxserver.io’s blog and I value their advice. When v4 of Ghost came out, I wasn’t a fan of the direction it was taking. They seem to be chasing WordPress now and getting fairly bloated. I get why they are doing it, but again, not the direction I wanted to go in.

Which leaves…

Jekyll vs Hugo

The two cool new kids.

I’ve been aware of the static website wave the past few years and think its a great step forward/back (depending on how you look at it) in simplifying websites. I’ve at least heard of Jekyll because of GitHub’s Tom Preston-Werner’s involvement but I had not heard of Hugo.

The great thing about these static websites is that they can be hosted for free on GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages. I know those are some other options around, but I use both already so I plan on sticking to them.

There is a lot of great sites around comparing Jekyll and Hugo so I wont go in depth about the differences. The main reason I chose Hugo was because of Ruby. Jekyll uses Ruby and I currently have no interest in learning that at this point. I know it’s not the greatest attitude, especially for a programmer, but it’s the truth in my decision.

Summary

So yeah, Hugo. It’s been pretty great so far and I have been very surprised on how robust it is.

The one thing I really enjoy is coveted tinker factor. I’ve always been interested in best practices and optimizations. This I feel creates a great starting point to play around with. Some of the things I plan on exploring

• Removing unused CSS
• Minifying/Removing FontAwesome
• Minimizing requests to 3rd parties (fonts, metrics, etc)
• Remove Google Fonts while still looking appealing
• Minimizing use of JavaScript
• Converting Images to WebP or some other optimized formats

But the speed so far is amazing. I’ve never seen, let alone gotten, a 100 score on lighthouse before. Didn’t realize there is fireworks!

I’ve already broken through the learning curve for the most part and now it’s just playing around and tinkering. On the next post I’m going to explain my environment setup including hosting as I don’t see a whole lot of information on that part on the web.