Landed in Hugo Island

After years hopping between one platform to another, I’ve made up my mind to use hugo as my blogging platform. If you’re remembered around ’00s, there was quite limited social media platform, It started with blogspot that turned out into blogger, and yes it still exists out there even my first web blog is still there under blogspot. 

Secondly, the blogging platform I used was Wordpress. I did always ‘come and go’ using this platform.  It’s quite simple, real good for blogging. If you fancy a minimal website platform with less image, videos, without adding plugins onto it,  it’s good for it. At the same time around 2010’s, I decided to try tumblr which had quite a lot of good feature, in terms of writing, good integration between one social media platform to another, and so on. The time when social media platform is everywhere, and everyone seems to own it.

Around 2020’s where internet for me personally has been bad for some reasons, seems like most big tech companies were doing data harvesting for their business model, even startup companies who haven’t even born yet, tried to start doing the same things, seeing how successful the big tech companies who started as startup company doing this kind of business. The worst thing ever happened was selling customer data to any third party without consent. Even most tech companies I once trusted, it became questionable. Back to blogging platform, around these years, I decided to use writefreely, which can easily deployed using VPS. Just like wordpress, it offered really simple, minimal and clean blogging platform. It’s been real good to me, for writing purposes. But then if you like tweaking your website using this, it’s quite limited. Then, I tried ghost, as in casper the friendly ghost. Ghost can be deployed quite easily using docker as well. It has a lot of features, compared to writefreely. Ghost for me, is quite similar to wordpress in terms of content management system, integrated system with another, quite a lot of themes if you’re lazy to start from scratch. Ghost is easy, not easy to tweak, if you’re familiar using helper, or partial just like Hugo, it’s good for you. It’s limited if you want to go further, because both writefreely and ghost offers the pro versions of their business to use their pro versions which can be more exploited.

Finally, I decided using a static site generator, Hugo, written in go language. Actually I have tried using Jekyll which use Ruby, another static site generator. But, decided to use Hugo, both of them are open source, very well performance web, fast, free to use and quite simple, you just need a basic HTML, CSS knowledge and if you are familiar with git, additionally a basic terminal knwoledge for git command. You can choose any themes you like or even you can start build your own themes. By using hugo, you can tweak like almost everything based on your liking, it has a good forum support as well if you need help and deployed quite easily just like any public html static site do. In terms of performance it’s unquestionable. Best for writing purposes, just like ghost writefreely, written in markdown. Some hugo themes are offering rich content with good performance. I did try many themes, each author has a different style of coding, and decided to make one using many good themes as reference.