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Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

dannyguo.com

61–70 of 92 posts

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#61
I really like Hugo and use it for one of my websites. It is refreshing to get such a fast website.

Where I find Hugo lacking though is I have found it very difficult to theme. Hugo has a very particular way of doing things with sections, sub-sections, leaf nodes and branch nodes, and a very particular folder structure where having an index.md file does one thing, but an _index.md file means something totally different. This would be fine if the docs were extensive and explained this clearly but they are very light in this area and most knowledge seems to be burried in individual disqus posts and other people's heads. I am sure it makes sense to people already familiar to Hugo, but trying to grok it all as a new-comer has been difficult.

As a result working out how to do even trivial things such as listings of pages in grandchild-directories, or even just having a list of child pages with other textual content has been a terrible struggle for me. Existing themes are invariably horrendously out of date, so trying to learn from those is also difficult. To this day on my site, if you go to specific directory paths there is literally a blank page because for the life of me I cannot work out how to make Hugo display just a simple list of posts in grandchild directories. It is infuriating! Perhaps it is my fault for wanting a semantic directory structure (e.g. domain.com/subject1/subject2/actualContentInHere/ and the pages for subject1/ and subject2/ are literally blank).

TL;Dr - good but if you want to do more than CSS tweaks on an existing theme then you're in for a challenge.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#62

I really like Hugo and use it for one of my websites. It is refreshing to get such a fast website. Where I find Hugo lacking though is I have found it very difficult to theme. Hugo has a very particular way of doing things with sections, sub-sections, leaf nodes and branch nodes, and a very particular folder structure where having an index.md file does one thing, but an _index.md file means something totally differen…

I second this. I built my own template from scratch and even though my layout structure is quite simple it consumed a lot of time to find out how where to put files in order to make things happen. I agree that better documentation would have helped, but it would be also great if Hugo was more (explicitly) configurable instead of purely relying on conventions.

(Once setup though, I continue to enjoy Hugo – it’s fast and mostly stays out of one’s way.)

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally enjoy the grand tradition of nerds writing blogs only about how they set up a blog.

I thought I would also end up just being one of those (I had a sort of setting-up the blog using Hugo post too). But lately my blogging on many other topics that I'm really passionate about has picked up. Writing in Org mode has really reduced the writing block for me. I'm so glad I switched from Octopress to Hugo about maybe 2 years back.

Have you at least blogged about using org-mode?

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#64

Speaking as a newbie (python and R mostly) who just wants the blogging software to blog, I use Jekyll because it’s the default choice. Yes there are python options but I don’t want to program the software - my programming energy is already spoken for. I don’t care about the speed differential. However if Hugo is actually easier somehow, well that would be tempting.

as someone with relatively rudimentary skills who tried and failed two or three times to get jekyll working on a throwaway vps, hugo is indeed very, very easy.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#65

I feel like people spend more time migrating blogging engines than actually blogging.

I still use bleeding edge PHP with articles written in XML originally implemented in 2001, it works no need to change, only occasional template or PHP related improvements.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#67
post #8

We switched the Let's Encrypt website from Jekyll to Hugo. We did it primarily for i18n support (Jekyll does not support translation), but it would have been worth it just to avoid Jekyll's ruby dependency nightmare. Hugo is a single static binary, so simple.

Thank you! The LE site is terrific (as is LE itself). Because it is open-source, I essentially cloned it for a professional association. https://casinoanalytics.org Credit to LE is on the FAQ page. Thanks again.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#68
I see these articles come up quite often yet it makes no sense to switch to hugo. I also tried it because I was fed up with Ruby (not Jekyll). It turns out that the tedium of implicit hell and cryptic templates which comes with hugo makes it much worse than the occasional bumps with upgrading Jekyll. Hugo is like choosing Scala (which is a baroque abomination of implicit stuff) over Kotlin (which is a pragmatic language). I think the problem here is bias. When you are fed up with something you tend to see everything else through rose colored glasses. See hugo for what it is: a tedious, cryptic unintuitive and dumb static site engine.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#69
post #8

We switched the Let's Encrypt website from Jekyll to Hugo. We did it primarily for i18n support (Jekyll does not support translation), but it would have been worth it just to avoid Jekyll's ruby dependency nightmare. Hugo is a single static binary, so simple.

And it is full of implicit stuff, cryptic templates, and the whole thing is pretty unintuitive. You also cant write plugins for it. Jekyll has i18n support I dont know what you are talking about.

Re: Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo

#70
post #2

I don't see myself moving from Jekyll for a long time. And it's mainly because of Jekyll-Assets. It's just too useful for not only bundling assets but effortlessly md5 tagging everything for caching on the nginx side of things. Hugo and others have nothing like this, and rolling your own set up isn't feasible for that because for it to be done right, it needs to be supported at the generator / plugin level so your te…

An asset pipeline (and templatized at that) is being added to Hugo as we speak. Just Sass support to begin with but more later. Once that’s added the reasons to use Jekyll, which is essentially abandonware, will shrink to zero.

The reasons to use hugo are negative. I only have cons to it.
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