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Failed attempt at migrating to Hugo

December 30, 2022 — Nico Cartron

A few thoughts on why I gave up migrating to Hugo


Rationale

I like BashBlog, which I have been using on my Blog since April 2020 (so almost 3 years). I like its simplicity:

  • write my article in Markdown
  • launch the bb.sh script
  • rsync to my webserver
  • and voilĂ !

But one thing I got told a few times already (mainly by my buddy Eole) is that it is ugly - and true, I have put no effort in making it look good, since I'm using the default CSS.

Finding another static site generator

When I (re)started blogging 3 years ago, I had tried a few "popular" static site generator, including Hugo and Jekyll.
While they offer a lot of features (themes, scripting, ...) and are a lot more customisable and look a lot better, they are also (at least for me) a lot more complicated to use!!!

I just want to quickly publish an article 3 or 4 times a month - most of the time, I have spent a few hours on each article, and I'm not really in a mood to spend more than 5 minutes to publish it.

I spent 2 nights trying Hugo, finding a nice theme, playing with options, understanding the differences between a "standard" post and "bundle pages", and in the end it still did not work for me.

Sticking to BashBlog

So I gave up, removed the few folders I had created for Hugo, but nonetheless I had a look at the CSS files I was using - and found a nice gentleman who had posted a review of BashBlog, along with some CSS files he had created (see this article).

So I tried them, found one which made my Blog look at bit better, and applied it :)

I also got feedback from a Twitter follower (@_fyr) "complaining" about the text size being too small on his laptop, so I modified the CSS file to display a bigger text for screen size > 600 pixels wide - I wouldn't call it responsive, but it's definitely a lot better than it used to be, especially on mobile where now an article really uses all the available space!

You can see by yourself below, thanks to Firefox's excellent "Responsive Design Mode":

  • first pica is for a large screen (iPad/Desktop)
  • second pica is for a smaller screen (iPhone SE)

Wrap Up

With this failed attempt and the improvements done on my CSS, I think I'll stick to BashBlog for some time - let me know if there are other things you'd like me to change!


Tags: Geek


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