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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

From WordPress to what?

Only a week in, but at the moment I'm building out things with HUGO and experiments are going very well.

Decided to seek out the absolute antithesis of WordPress after this experience, and don't wish to be dependent on peoples whims so much anymore.

I recognise the limitations of SSGs, but I think these are overcomeable, and the benefits (Speed, CI) seem massive.

I am open to hearing other suggestions people may have though.

Interested to hear your experience with HUGO- I’ve done a lot of development in Go and keen to give this a crack.

Flawless, it's really easy to wrap your head around (especially if you grok Go).

I would recommend spinning up the most basic site from scratch to give it a try, takes minutes tops and its got a built in dev server to see your site.

It pretty much all rapidly clicked into place from there. The idea of adding content as markdown is so easy and appealing, and the flow is so logical. The build times make me smile. Everything feels so rapid and under my control.

It's maybe an issue with me but I've been on blogotext where I would post stuff, then on Hugo but the tooling was taking most of my energy and the version upgrade path was a blocker for my themes, plugins, etc. I was clueless how to solve those pains without coding and opening issues. Then I tried zola but it was buggy, and I had to learn Rust to fix one basic issue which took days of rewriting code review after review. And having yet to setup a pipeline and fight to make that work, just too much for me. Then I went to WordPress and didn't had to mess with trying to make the blogging system adapt to my needs with code, it was just flexible enough with a nice WYSIWYG editor and admin panel and plugins. No mess with ci/cd build times, manual upgrades and reading language specs and opening issues to make things work. Those things were not needed to just blog.

Today I'm still on WordPress and none of the SSG feel simple enough to me.

Git, markdown, build pipelines... Code editor. It's all fun for work and collaboration with devs but just out of interest for blogging. Also they mostly generate invalid HTML and lack features or have custom templates. And next upgrade could break everything.

I prefer something that is helping me focus on blogging for long term without upgrade maintenance cost and without fearing platform dies. But yeah WordPress is not perfect and I'm considering maybe to glue a few tools together in the long run and make my edits in pure txt or HTML for which no existing SSG or WordPress are needed.

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