Blog with Hugo

Switch from jekyll

When I first want to build a blog and counter jekyll, I’m really happy about the result for only working for days. It’s easy, fast and GitHub Pages supported. I found this great tutorial on YouTube by Thomas Bradley. It really makes everything clear and simple to build basic framework of the website. With a little help from Bootstrap, I, even never build a website myself, finished first version of my blog within a week. Then I found Hugo, same static website generator by golang. It’s really fast compare to jekyll, Hugo benchmark. It completed 5,000 posts in 7 second. It could be a main advantage of hugo inherit by golang.

Pros

• Super fast
• More flexible syntax than liquid template
• Since uploading content not source code, no wait until GitHub Pages render your pages
• Theme feature, easily switch and package theme

Cons

• Not GitHub Page supported
• No default theme to show content
• Docs is not as clear and easy to follow as jekyll

Quick start

1. Download and install hugo from Hugo.
2. Create a new folder for your website and hugo new site . or hugo new site sitename, hugo will create for you.
3. Create a sample post by hugo new post/postname.md, hugo will create front matter for you.
4. Download theme from Hugo Themes, unzip and put it in sitename/themes
5. Let hugo know which theme you’re using, by adding theme = "themename" to config.toml
6. Fire up hugo by hugo or hugo serve, using hugo will build your website under public folder, hugo serve -w wont’ create anything, just visit site at localhost:1313. -w to watch the website change and reflect immediately.