Converting This Blog To Hugo

On Saturday I converted my blog from WordPress to Hugo as an experiment and it went quite well. I downloaded the xml file and then I converted that xml with blog2md to go from xml to md pages. A page was created for every single blog post. This took a while. I now have my blog both as static pages, and as a wordpress blog.

Two challenges

There are two challenges. The first is that Hugo has to generate over 5000 pages each time I generate the site, or at least it has to check 5000 pages per change. That's several minutes of work, every time I tell Hugo to build the site. The next concern is that if I make a change I don't know whether I need to re-generate the entire site to reflect that change or whether it will just generate one page. I can run tests using Git Version control to see what's happening.

Is Hugo or WordPress Lighter

I don't know whether Hugo is heavier, because of every individual file, or whether WordPress is heavier, due to all the functionality that I barely ever use. WordPress often feels bloated and slow, especially in the admin console. It would be nice to play either with markdown, as I'm doing for this post, or html, as I could do, if I want more flexibility

Images Still Load

One of the surprises I came acrosss is that images still load, whether I am in the blog directory I created for testing purposes on the website, or within the wordpress blog folder, as I did by mistake. It's pretty easy to make the change, as long as you keep the assets where they're expected. I might consider deleting most of the wordpress install except for the media assets. That will be decided lateri.

What I Like About Hugo

What I like about Hugo is that the blog is generated and links between pages are taken care of automatically. As long as the tags and categories are set ahead of time, the generator will take care of the rest. As I browsed through the blog generated by Hugo I liked the look and feel. That's before I spend time tweaking the theme and trying to add more.

An Alternative Approach

The blog I use now has been around for 20 years or so. This means that if I make a big change, like migrate from WordPress to Hugo I will kill all the hyperlinks and hierarchy and it will take time for search engines and links to be written to make the new version visible. Having said this the traffic to the site is low and there is a chance that the change will not be noticed. It's by updating and linking to pages that I will make the entire site more visible.

And Finally

I have written the last two blog posts using VIM and I like the interface. It's limited in functionality, because I haven't spent enough time playing with VIM but it feels fast, and effective as a blogging tool. If I use Day One it takes time to load, I theoretically need to pay a subscription and then I need to cut and paste the content from there, to the blog. With this I could press esc, :wq, save, and write hugo and it will upload automatically. My reason for not doing that, for now, is that I don't want to risk sharing the configuration for connecting to the server. Time will decide.