This blog has had many forms over the years. Previous renditions have been powered by Jekyll, WordPress, and Moveable Type. When Ghost was released, I immediately moved to a self-hosted instance. Ghost is great, and I really like it. But I have started reducing subscription services that I no use regularly. Because the last post to the blog was in April of last year, paying for Ghost every year seemed like a no-brainer subscription to cancel.

While I didn’t want to pay for Ghost anymore, I still aspire to write things and put them on the internet, even if it’s infrequent. I needed a new option for my rare writing. So I began looking at static website generators. There are many options, and they all do essentially the same thing. I settled on Hugo. A static site generator that bills itself as being super fast. It’s written in Go (a language I love) and has many templates ready to be used. Posts are written in Markdown, with metadata supplied by YAML frontmatter.

Hosting is an S3 bucket behind a CloudFront distribution giving me excellent uptime for an insignificant cost. The hosting will scale from a couple views in a month to hundreds of thousands of views per day without batting an eye. The site is built and deployed automatically by a GitHub Action whenever a new commit is pushed to the main branch. The automation allows me to use the GitHub web UI as an online editor. And when I’m at my laptop, I have the full suite of editors available to me.

I moved over the last couple of posts from my old site and got everything up and running in less than 3 hours one evening. I would highly recommend Hugo to anyone looking for an easy to set up and use static website generator.