This blog is currently powered by Hugo, a static site generator built in Go. However this was not my first choice. Initially I was going to use Jekyll for the simple reason that I had heard of it before and it is what Github uses to power Github Pages.
Almost immediately I decided that while Jekyll seems fine to use I did not want to be limited to what Github natively offers, and I didn’t have to. Github generates the static site and then pushes the static content to the Github Pages ’environment’. This basically means Github will push any content to Github Pages including any content not generated by Jekyll. I could use this to manually build my Jekyll static content in a Github Workflow push that content to a branch the Github Pages Workflow listens to and voila I am no longer bound to Github Jekyll while I can still use Github Pages (and Jekyll!)!
So why are you now using Hugo?
Well, I tried to update Jekyll to a more current version..
The Jekyll upgrade manual makes it seem so easy. Just execute bundle update or gem update jekyll! I wish 😄!
I spent days going over different aspects of the Ruby ecosystem (that I knew nothing about and still don’t know much about), fighting with Bundler and my Gemfile. Wondering why none of the update commands did anything.
After the weekend I was talking to coworkers about my struggles. They asked, why are you using Jekyll? Just use Hugo, we already use it for our internal docs.
So I tried Hugo. And it worked. And I was happy.
And I am happy 😉
Note: I’m not blaming Jekyll or Ruby for that matter. I’m sure they are wonderful tools. But I’m not a ruby developer, I don’t want to have to learn the intricacies of Ruby to manage a blog.