Around twelve months ago I posted about how I was migrating this blog back to Hugo. That migration lasted around 6 months at which time I switched to Grav. I had fiddled around with Grav in the very early says of this blog but had commenced with Hugo.
Just before Christmas 2019 there were some changes made to Hugo which meant the theme I was using broke and my site wouldn’t render properly. I tried to fix it - unsuccessfully. As a result I switched to Grav. It worked well for a time but there were occasional issues with the site - namely that the bigfoot footnotes would only render correctly around half the time, and sometimes the archives and tag/category clouds didn’t seem to be complete.
This blog began a little over two years ago. In that time it has been created/managed/manifested firstly by Hugo, then by Wordpress, then by HTMLy, and now back to Hugo.
I worked out that my first round with Hugo was 9 months (May 2017 to Feb 2018), then 7 months on Wordpress (Mar to Sep 2018) and 8 months in HTMLy (Oct 2018 to May 2019).
Why change? I have different thoughts about ease of use, aesthetics, flat file vs database and ease of access/update. I would prefer some flat file/text based system. I value ease of use. I want the blog to be pleasing to look at. I want the information I choose to be front and centre of the site. Each of those platforms has offered different measures of that criteria.
When I first began this blog in May 2017 I wanted to avoid heavy CMS’ like WordPress, Joomla etc. I instead wanted a flat file system and chose Hugo.
I still like the idea or the philosophy behind a flat file approach, but my setup meant I could only update posts from one machine. I think this was somewhat limiting so I reconsidered my platform. After fiddling with Joomla, I have instead gone for WordPress. I have had some limited experience with WordPress in the past with a church website so it was a shallow learning curve.
After a bit of testing, fiddling and pondering I’ve decided to opt for Hugo as my CMS. It’s flat file, a single executable, multi-platform (which only needs to cover GNU-Linux and Windows in my stable), lightweight, well documented and has a swag of themes.
We’re ready to roll…