How Go has improved yet another thing in my life - this time - blogging!

Go is awesome⌗

This week has been sponsored by my migration to hugo. These are all of my findings from a few days, moving from Jekyll x Github Pages combo to Hugo x Netlify.

In case you don’t know what Hugo is - Hugo is Go-powered, open-source, static site generator. It makes everything fast and neat. And it’s markdown compatible, so I can stay within one single domain (I do write documentation in markdown on a daily basis, as probably every other dev) and not learn some new formatting tools.

Or, god forbid, writing that stuff in some nice, accessible CMS on some proper blog-hosting site. I want to do EEEEEVVEEEERYYYYTHIIINGGG in my terminal and VIM.

Kudos if you got the little reference there!

Migration is a bliss⌗

A lot of the blog posts are mentioning that the migration from Jekyll to Hugo is a rather time-consuming thing. And you couldn’t be more wrong to be honest.

The major thing I’ve used was a nice python script written by coderzh which took the whole Jekyll blog and rebuilt the posts.

Also, it’d be a crime if I wouldn’t say that hugo documentation is AMAZING. Anything you need - is probably there already.

Themes are amazing⌗

You want a minimal theme? Clean? Dark? Mobile? Fast? Hugo themes got you covered.

I can’t design, I can’t see stuff and my area of expertise is everything terminal-based. That’s why, this bit has been the most fun one - I could just go in, pick and match what I need.

And thanks to templates in Go, every part of the theme can be extended and reused.

Netlify is beautiful⌗

I remember, that deploying on GitHub Pages has never been the most painless experience ever. Also, gh-pages are set up to work with Jekyll first and I had some issues with working out nooks and crannies of that deployment (normally, you should be good with adding .nojekyll file to the root of your publishing source.

So, after wrestling with gh-pages for a while, I gave Netlify a go.

And that was AN AMAZING IDEA. The longest bit was changing my DNS setup but, apart from that, everything took less than 3 minutes.

Content setup⌗

I like stuff that’s automated and I don’t really have to do much if it’s automated once. Most probably nju will see a massive overhaul over the weekend, as I want the blogging to be as seamless as possible. Hugo has opened up an array of new possibilities.

Also, please don’t judge me on the package, it’s old but it worked like a bliss since I’ve started blogging. And it’s more than 2 years old at the moment!

Let’s checkout what I’ve found so far:

date: "2021-06-24T00:00:00Z"
title: A Love Letter To Hugo
draft: true
tags: [hugo]
toc: true
  • Date - it’s simple. The fun bit, is that I can build my local development server by running hugo server --buildDrafts --buildFuture which takes care of building the draft post (noted by draft: true) and building the future post (I’m writing this post a day earlier now). Although simple, it’s a massive quality-of-life improvement!
  • Tags - Hugo automatically gets all the tags I use and packs them neatly under tags tab on this blog.
  • TOC - aka Table of Contents - again, it’s automatic! Hugo automatically gets all ## headers and builds the table of contents. And if you’ll use any lower level (###), it’ll create nested paragraphs there. So good!

And, if I want to have a custom summary, other than the first 20 words of the post - the only thing I have to do is to write the it after the params block and add <!--more--> at the new line below how I want to summarize my post.

Nitty gritty⌗

Let’s look into a few bits from config.toml used to tailor this blog.

I’m using a great terminal theme made by panr - your mileage may wary.

[...]
[permalinks]
  posts = "/blog/:title"

[params]
  showMenuItems = 6

  favicon = "images/favicon.ico"

[languages]
  [languages.en]
  [...]
    [languages.en.menu]
      [[languages.en.menu.main]]
        identifier = "About"
        name = "About"
        url = "/about"

I’ve chosen the bits I really like - and a few that took me a second of reverse engineering my theme to understand how it actually works.

  • posts = "/blog/:title" - because my Jekyll blog had akondas.com/blog/:title url per each post, I wanted to keep the same for the V2. If I’ll ever want to change it, I just have to change it there, Hugo will take care of it.
  • showMenuItems = 6 - if I’ll ever extend a bit more, I can either print all menu items out-of-the-box - or, I can wrap them for a neater, cleaner experience.
  • favicon - my theme looks for the favicon.ico icon under static/images
  • languages - yes, by default, I can have MULTIPLE language options on my blog and I can have them sorted automagically. AND, I can get my menu items set by the language.

This is great⌗

This is great

This blog is my fourth or fifth blog over the years. I’ve been on almost every platform that’s available for free and I have to say - this is the most fun I had ever.

The ease of use, the self-automation, the expandability - it’s all here.

Plans for the future⌗

I’ll just go with everything I want - let’s see how far I can push the envelope:

  • A search bar - I’ve been putting off playing with Elasticsearch for ages now, I want to see how easy it’ll be to plug that here
  • Extra layouts - I have a few ideas for the modular layouts system I want to use
  • At the end of each post, propose my last most popular post
  • New nju package - my idea is:
    • When writing a post, set the post parameters before even starting writing the posts from the list of ever-expanding properties (that’d mean either a scrapper of all tags I’ve used so far probably)
    • When finishing my VIM session, let’s ask the user (me) if that’s a draft or not
    • Time of the post should be pickable from the CLI - do I want to post it now? In the future? How far?
    • Show me all posts that are in draft state so I could go and finish them
    • And most importantly - bring nju from late 2018 to 2021!

As you can see, that’s a lot. But we’re not in any rush, it’ll be fun!

If that post helped you in any way, shape or form - let me know! I’m happy to discuss more and help you - of course if you’ll need help. I believe in you!