Am I Happy about Hugo?
When I decided to revive this blog and create a new personal homepage, I chose Hugo to run both projects, and Azure Static Websites to host them.
After some work and some days of real use, I decided to talk about the experience.
With Hugo and Azure Static Websites, I don't need a database, and I don't need to patch the blog engine. Everything is static.
Hugo is excellent for the personal homepage
Creating www.lorenzobarbieri.info was incredibly easy, fast, and straightforward, also for people who dislike frontend development.
I found a great template for a single page site, then I poked with it a little bit; after that, I added some content, images, tweaked some HTML, and the result was much better than my expectations.
Hugo is good for the blog
I'm not a MarkDown person, so writing blog posts using it requires some work. I'm using a regular editor with spell-checking and other features, and then I'm copying the MD text in VS Code.
I've not automated the creation of the static site yet. At the moment, I'm using a batch file to compile everything and Azure Storage Explorer to copy the results on the Blob Storage. Still, I've already planned to implement a GitHub Action to automate everything.
Hugo takes A LOT of time to prepare my blog
With more than 4000 posts, including all the old ones, it takes a lot of time to compile them. Probably when I implement the GitHub Action, everything will be smooth and streamlined, but at the moment, it's not a short task.