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Cake day: February 27th, 2025

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  • manxu@piefed.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSimple Blog options?
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    46 minutes ago

    Did you look at Pelican? I share the frustration with much of Hugo’s infrastructure: the template language is buggy and inscrutable, and the plugin architecture wanting.

    I ended up with Hugo, but I considered Pelican. It uses standard Jinja templates, which I find much more rational (but it might just be me) and I recall there were plugins for a lot of things, including different source formats. The code is written in Python, so that even if there isn’t a plugin for a format you need, there probably is a Python library for it and it should be relatively easy to make it a plugin.

    Crap, now I want to switch to Pelican…


  • Hugo watch mode (both server and build) does not produce accurate sites on change and is really meant for development. I find after a developing for a while, I have to kill the process and restart it and then things are “fresh”

    From reading the documentation, I strongly have the impression that hugo focuses on being fast on re-render and that the idea is to build and deploy to public site each time there is a change. The big difference is probably whether to render locally and push the generated content, or to push the source markdown and render remotely (which I chose).


  • I ended up with Hugo, a git repository, and a cron job for the build. I write an article, check it in, the server picks up the git change and rebuilds the site. What I like about the setup is that the server only has the binaries hugo and git, and a shell script for the rebuild. Also, I write in Markdown, add media to the git repository, and articles are published soon after I check in without any remoting on my part.

    I did look at WriteFreely after the setup, though. I find the minimalist design very beautiful. Didn’t switch to it, but may look at it again for another project. https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely



  • I went the same direction, from WordPress to static site generation. I did the same evaluation as you are trying to do and ended up with Hugo, mostly because there is a lot of support available for it. My runner up was Pelican, because I was fluent in Jinja2, but I didn’t want to mess around with the templates and Hugo’s were prettier. Sue me, I am shallow.

    The one regret I have about Hugo is that the templating language is challenging. I am trying to be as neutral as possible, but it seemed like even simple things were complicated to achieve. If someone would come up with a Hugo that speaks Jinja2, I’d be really delighted.

    Other than that, conversion from WordPress to Hugo was relatively straightforward, despite needing to find a gallery component and converting menus. Hugo is indeed very fast in processing, which become important when your blog has thousands of articles.

    I set up the blog as a private git repository. The server pulls from it, then runs Hugo and a full text search engine, and the content is visible and searchable within five minutes on update.