after more than a decade
Just so you know, I’ve been a WordPress user, admin, and plugin author for more than a decade now. I could’ve set this up as yet another one of those ubiquitous WordPress pages. This time, however, I’m taking a different approach. HUGO is my tool of choice as I’m a DevSecOps Advisor, leaning into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and of course the automation behind this declarative setup. So here it comes… Yet another steep learning curve for me and a completely new piece of technology to embrace and use. That’s the spirit :)
What’s the difference?
WordPress and similar CMSs rely on a database being present and dynamically generate the content every time you browse to a website. This leads to
- slower loading times
- energy spent on dynamically generating pages every time a user visits
- bloated databases keeping the version history and tombstones of plugins no longer used
With HUGO I get to experience the following benefits:
- writing my content in Markdown syntax (distraction free)
- using the same toolchain I employ for the rest of my cloud computing and developing needs
- the website gets generated into a static version when I push a new revision
- blazingly fast loading times
Regarding drawbacks I’m aware that HUGO is intended to be a lightweight solution and doesn’t have as many plugins as WordPress, so I need to downsize a bit. I take that as an upside as it makes me think about the purpose of the website just that bit harder and the phenomenon called scope creep can hopefully be avoided. Another challenge is the learning curve to get up to speed with all the options and the completely different approach to publishing.