Migrated to Hugo

I’m kinda bored with Wordpress. Its bloated, kinda annoying to maintain, and has some questionable leadership at this point. I’d looked at migrating to an SSG in the past, but none jumped out as being super easy to set up.

I saw a random tutorial about Hugo and it looked interesting so I investigated further and played around a mini-site to see if made sense to use ongoing. Turns out its both easy to set up and super fast at generating my (not-so-small) number of blog posts.

I followed a couple of Youtube Hugo tutorials and was able to get Hugo and and a theme installed. I tried to get the theme and templates to bend to my will a bit and quickly got discouraged and ended up resorting to get Gemini to help me work out stuff was problematic in the theme and the way I wanted to use it. So, I gave it a break.

Next, I tried a new idea. How about letting Claude scaffold what I’m looking for. I gave it a short-ish paragraph saying I wanted a blog, a few static pages, and a client side search feature. It spit out a decent template and detailed instructions on how to do basic customizations, import content from my old Wordpress install (including redirects for old URLs!), and how to add content going forward. A few places were more clever than I needed (dynamic entries for Elsewhere section) but were straightforward enough to reduce to a static template.

I walked through all my previous posts and weeded out a lot of obsolete content and fixed a lot of image paths. Unfortunately, a previous Wordpress migration a while ago misplaced a bunch of images. I’ve probably got the images in a backup somewhere, but I don’t think its worth the effort to resurrect them.

While doing that clean up operation, I noticed that I missed porting my Wordpress post categories. Ugh. I re-migrated the original Wordpress content to markdown with the missing categories and Clause was able to migrate the missing categories into the clean up corpus of blog posts. Pure magic, evidently.

I’m still on the fence about doing something for comments. I never got a lot of comments, so I’m not super motivated to either port legacy comments or wire something up to handle them going forward. Anybody I really care about that needs leave a comment knows how to get in touch otherwise.

No guarantees, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back a regular posting schedule since the new tools are kinda fun. Loves me some markdown in Lazyvim.