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Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

I recently moved my blog over from Wordpress to Hugo. I think it must be a lot easier to start out from scratch than to migrate something existing; some parts of Hugo are substantially less than straightforward.

I certainly don't regret the move - much happier having a static site than WP in place - but some of this is much more complex than I had hoped it would be. Amongst other issues;

* error messages can be extremely opaque (although usually easy to google, at least) * upgrading to new versions is not always straightforward

I deploy my site via rsync, but got bitten immediately by a very odd bug with respect to file timestamps (#6161) where a bunch of my files were warped back to the 1750's.

I personally am happy with hugo. I probably wouldn't recommend it at this point though...

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Similar issues from my side. Cryptic documentation, bad dissorganized forum and configuration,... I love the hugo idea but to find one detail you will get into chaos of strange wording and noise. I am using it but I try to configure as small amount as possible as I always get into some undesired behaviour. It seems like it was from begining build with idea and then continued by patch over patch over patch. Cant recomend it either.

I decided I would make a static site the old fashioned way on neocities.org and happily got started. And then I remembered all the double work you have to do linking and making lists and repeating headers/footers (or use frames) and so on. Now I'm back to looking for some simple script that can output static sites without having to spend a month learning a new tool...

Hmmm... maybe tumblelog [0]. Comes in both a Python and a Perl version (as a single script). Demo site: https://plurrrr.com/

[0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

I tried a few about four years back, when I had much less web dev experience than I do today (not a professional developer). I found Jekyll to be the easiest for me. Just powerful enough to make pretty much any static site I could think of, but easy enough that even I could do it. Hosting was easy too, at the time I just FTPd everything to my provider, but I now o use rsync.

I have a site like that on Tilde Town. It's much smaller than my blogs or other sites, though, so managing links and repeating code is not that big of a deal.

It's a mess, and evokes abject horror in some people, but I'll continue to defend the merit of just writing a shell script. I moved it to hugo years ago (ironically) but my old site worked like that: https://github.com/japanoise/website/blob/cdf728d4ebea75cbc9...

It's not pretty to look at, but it can be read, understood, and maintained by one person.

I'm pretty sure my problem with everything I tried so far was that it wasn't me building it so I guess I just have to make some simple script to do it for me some day.

+1 to japanoise's suggestion to write your own static blog script. Here's mine, which I initially wrote several years ago after evaluating & having issues with many other options: https://github.com/Sequoia/sequoia.github.com/blob/rewrite/s...

I recently evaluated migrating to Hugo to ditch my hastily written script & use a 'robust, mature' tool. I wanted to add an RSS feed and figured "why work more on my one off script, I could use a pre-built solution!" But migrating was indeed a pain in the butt, and it quickly became clear that writing a function to output an RSS feed was much faster than doing everything I needed to migrate.

Static blogs are very simple, and performance doesn't matter that much for all but the most prolific authors, and you can improve performance if needed. Write your own script!

I'm not sure if I'd call it sound advice - but there's not much stopping you from building a site based around (client side) Javascript these days. Maybe a markdown parser in js, some json (js) data files (à "database") - etc.

Basically a variant of how:

https://tiddlywiki.com/

works. Or:

https://chrisdiana.dev/cms.js/

In a similar vein (but not solely client hosted and managed) there's:

https://vuelog.js.org/#/page/about

https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

If all you need is a blog, it's really just a bit of navigation you need js/<some program> to help with. And you can of course add things like commenting as a SaaS that's essentially just an imported cross side scripting attack on yourself, much like with visitor tracking via Google analytics etc. See for example muut.com for comments.

My main issue was how hard it was to do some simple things (or I didn't understand the documentation). I use Lektor for my site and it's been very easy to set up and use, I recommend it.

I like to blog to provide an online presence, but blogging for me is not that important. I cannot justify spending time in configuring and troubleshooting static site generators. I like WordPress because you can get it to work within minutes and all I have to worry about is writing content and coming up with ideas. I have a self-hosted WP instance, which conducts regular backups, and uses Let's Encrypt and auto renews monthly which I check on every 2 or 3 months to ensure everything is running correctly.

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