Yes, I’m moving again to a different blogging platform.

For some time I was using Jekyll but it had some drawbacks of me. Mainly, I don’t like Ruby. Well, I don’t understand Ruby and, honestly, I don’t feel like digging deeper into it.

So I wanted to get rid of ruby and find a platform that could run in a non-very-powerful cloud server (meaning “no database, forget wordpress”) but easy to work with. Ghost did the trick for some time.

But after some version change I had some problems updating posts — something I often do. I had no time or motivation to troublesshoot and fix it, so the blog remained kind of abandoned for some time.

Keeping track of changes via git was also a concern. This was not trivial for Ghost. So I thought about moving back to Jekyll. But looking at the available options I found Hugo.

Finding time in 2020 is not that complicated. Due to COVID-19 we have curfews and lockouts every now and then so there is no other option than staying at home during the weekend. Migrating was quite easy (not a lot of content). And this is the result.

# Installing hugo

I installed Hugo in my MacBook. I’m using homebrew so it is trivial:

% brew install hugo

# Creating the blog

Creating a site is again trivial. Just go to your favourite project directory and run:

% hugo new site quickstart

## Choosing a theme

There is a huge amount of themes for Hugo. I wanted something really simple so I chose Geekblog theme.

Just follow the instrucions in its homepage — basically download and unzip the current release. Funny enough, using get is not recommended (it is possible but makes things a bit more difficult and I do not want that).

I just had to make a few minor changes to adapt it to my taste.

Btw, there is a companion theme named Geekdoc that looks perfect for migrating my internal documentation, currently in a local Atlassian Confluence instance.

# Configuration file

The configuration file (hugo provides a reasonable default) may be a toml or yaml file.

# Creating a post

Creating new posts is as easy as:

% hugo new posts/my-new-post.md

This command will create a new file based on the template archetypes/default.md that looks like this for me:

---
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
url: 
tags: ['']
summary: 
---

# Markdown

Of course posts are written with markdown syntax. Learn more here:

• Markdown cheatsheet, Adam Pritchard
• The Markdown Guide, Matt Cone

# Shortcodes

Shortcodes are simple snippets inside your content files calling built-in or custom templates.

## Example

This code:

{{< highlight html >}}
<section id="main">
  <div>
   <h1 id="title">{{ .Title }}</h1>
    {{ range .Pages }}
        {{ .Render "summary"}}
    {{ end }}
  </div>
</section>
{{< /highlight >}}

will render:

<section id="main">
  <div>
   <h1 id="title">{{ .Title }}</h1>
    {{ range .Pages }}
        {{ .Render "summary"}}
    {{ end }}
  </div>
</section>

So the key is:

{{< highlight html >}}

{{< /highlight >}}

There are shortcodes for:

• gist
• instagram
• twitter
• vimeo
• youtube

…and many more.

I like these ones:

## Info/warning/danger boxes

I love these ones:

    text

    text

    text

# Emojis

Activate emojis adding this to the configuration file:

enableEmoji = true

Then you will be able to use:

See a complete reference here