So I just finished moving everything out of GoDaddy and into AWS - main reason being it’s significantly cheaper hosting sites and doing DNS through AWS, esp. because there is no significant traffic to any of my sites. However, amazon offers a number of nice things in addition to just lower cost, better performance hosting. I now have everything under https, which wasn’t a high priority, but AWS offers free SSL certs that you can use with CloudFront and ELBs.

With this move, I could have just forklifted my stuff out of GoDaddy’s hosting and into a similar setup with amazon (e.g. setup wordpress, and just export/import the blog). I don’t really have a strong desire to manage wordpress myself, and honestly wordpress is way more powerful that I need (I mean come on, I only have 7 or 8 posts that I’ve written during the past 2 years). I still wanted something nicer than rolling my own site from scratch, and something that would make managing my content easy. It also needed to have some form of version control support.

I decided to see if I could find a static site generator which would allow me to write in some form of markdown, and hopefully import all of the posts I had already written. A couple quick google searches later, and I had found Jekyll.

Jekyll seemed to fit the bill for importing from WordPress, and it claimed to handle blogs decently well, so I gave it a shot…. and quickly had to start digging through documentation. It correctly imported my wordpress posts, but the default formatting was horrendous. If I had wanted to spend a lot of time looking into it, I could probably have setup a theme. But I wanted to have to put as little effort into the styling as possible (and still have it look decent). Back to the googles.

Enter: Hugo. Hugo claimed to do similar things to jekyll, but not focus purely on blogs. It also claimed that it was extremely performant (not a huge issue in my case - as the difference between 3ms and 30ms per post for my blog isn’t too drastic overall). In fact, posts written for hugo and for jekyll have a number of similarities. It also has very well written documentation, which is easy to follow and find things in.

After playing around with it for a while, I decided to give it a shot. I found a theme, and converted the posts which jekyll had imported into hugo’s desired format. And here we are.

That was all yesterday evening. This afternoon, I considered my main site, and decided to see if hugo lived up to it’s claims of working well for both blogs and personal web sites.

It took minimal time to set up a new hugo site and transfer over the content from my personal site. I also found a theme that I like for it (though it required a few small modifications for my needs). Doing those modifications, I discovered that it’s actually remarkably easy to override templates and other things provided by themes.

Overall, hugo seems to be exactly what I need (at least for the time being).