---
title: "Move to Hugo"
date: 2022-09-21T20:38:55+03:00
-description: ""
+description: "based.quest is now using another static site generator, find out why the change and benefits of it in this writeup."
tags: ['site','news']
type: blog
draft: false
## First of all, why? Wasn't blogit perfect?
+No, no software ever is perfect. I will give credit where due, blogit is an amazing project that will
+work wonders for kickstarting a new personal blog. However, my ambitions have outgrown *just* a personal
+blog. I strive to make this site for the community (while also maintaining my personal blog) and blogit
+was not going to scale well going forward.
+
+That being said, if you have something to share that you feel like is based (and won't get me in trouble),
+you can clone the new [web-hugo.git](https://git.based.quest/web-hugo.git) repository, create a patch with
+your post and send it my way either via email or Matrix.
+
+## What's going to be different?
+
+Not too much for you, the reader, other than some neat improvements (such as tag and post pagination coming
+in the v0.2 of the Hugo site). The website will still be as light as ever for you to browse, I didn't spoil
+the website with JavaScript or some excess CSS "framework" - I will adhere to these principles that I set out
+when starting this website, I will reject all patches that try to add JavaScript or CSS frameworks.
+
+Behind the scenes, a lot has changed. First, the workflow has changed - back when using blogit, creating a
+page was as simple as using `touch articles/new-post.md`. Once you finished writing the article, you added it
+to the git repository and ran the makefile named "blogit" with target "build". For each build, it had to
+rebuild all the tag index pages, RSS feed, all the posts and the index page which is needlessly wasteful,
+especially given blogit's inefficiency (more on that later).
+
+With Hugo, I open one terminal window to run `hugo server` and another tab to run `hugo create posts/new-post.md`.
+That command creates a new file in the content/posts/ folder using a template (in Hugo world, "archetype").
+I have set it so it automatically fills in the post date and title alongside a few other metadata values
+I use to hint Hugo into building what I want. Do note that you do not *need* Hugo to contribute, you can still
+do it the old way. Once the post is generated, I just edit the post with nano on the same terminal window.
+Once I'm done editing and have saved, instead of having to rebuild the entire website, the earlier ran
+server automatically rebuilds the changed components and live reloads the page in your browser.
+This is a lot more convenient than with blogit and saves a bunch of time when writing posts and wanting to
+preview them as you go.
+
+Secondly, Hugo is a lot more flexible in adding function to the static pages. With blogit I had to go through
+hours of painstakingly editing the Makefile to make it do what I want just barely and even then the result
+was not the best. Hugo gives you flexible templating capabilities from Go, you can familiarise yourself with
+it [here.](https://pkg.go.dev/html/template) So you can expect me to be able to add somewhat more advanced
+features to the site that before I previously had to reject over complexity concerns.
+
+All in all, Hugo makes more sense. It saves time and also performs much better.
+
+## Was it difficult to bring content over?
+Not at all! Since blogit used markdown, the only annoyance was having to redefine preview image and the tags in header
+instead of the footer, otherwise posts ported over fine without any issues. As for how I kept the old URLs valid, I made
+use of [aliases in Hugo](https://gohugo.io/content-management/urls/#aliases). For example on my DeckPC Day-1
+post, I simply added a singl eine to the header: `aliases: ["/deckpc-day-one-experience.html"]`
+
+## How much faster is Hugo then?
+
+A lot. This is 15071 pages (of which 15k are just "sneedx" where x is 1 to 15000) generated in roughly
+the same amount of time as blogit generated my 14 posts on old source.
+```
+(deck@sneed web-hugo)$ time hugo
+Start building sites ...
+hugo v0.92.0+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown
+
+ | EN
+-------------------+--------
+ Pages | 15071
+ Paginator pages | 0
+ Non-page files | 0
+ Static files | 8
+ Processed images | 0
+ Aliases | 14
+ Sitemaps | 1
+ Cleaned | 0
+
+Total in 3658 ms
+
+real 0m3.741s
+user 0m6.876s
+sys 0m1.562s
+```
+
+Blogit on 14 posts:
+```
+real 0m3.554s
+user 0m2.481s
+sys 0m1.566s
+```
+
+The results speak for themselves. Current site as of writing this post, builds in ~70ms.
+
+## What happens to the old site?
+
+By time you see this post, it's already gone and replaced with the Hugo site.
+Should you wish to still make a copy of it, I have moved its repository to [web-old.git](https://git.based.quest/web-old.git).
+As it stands right now, that repository is archived and won't be accepting any more patches.
+
+Thanks for reading,
+- Cernodile
projects / web-hugo.git / commitdiff