I wanted to do this for a long time. The old blog site at blogspot was always supposed to be something temporary. It lasted five years…

I never really liked the look of the old blog site that much. And there weren’t that many options to customize it in the first place. The WYSIWYG editor was ugly and difficult to work with. And it was hard to prepare content and post it later. I could create new posts in HTML though and that’s how I ended up creating all previous posts. I would first write the post in txt2tags markup, convert that to HTML and create a new post with that. But then, editing existing content was cumbersome too.

On the other hand, I always liked static site generators. I’ve used them on several occasions too. I started up with Jekyll, which has an astonishing number of features, but it was a burden to install in Salix. There are lots of different Ruby dependencies involved and I didn’t want to have to install all of them on every PC that I wanted to edit the site from. It was possible to contain all that in a Python virtualenv and I was using it like that for a while, but in the end it was too much tinkering with tooling. I wanted something simpler. I tried a few other static site generators, but in the end I ended up with Hugo. It’s just one binary, I find it much simpler to use and it’s also really fast.

So, the new blog site is built with Hugo and is hosted at Github, using Github Pages. I found a theme that I liked, tweaked it a bit to match Salix aesthetics and just went with it.

Github Pages was not a real option until a few months ago, when they added support for HTTPS for all sites with a custom domain that are hosted there. I could have always uploaded the blog at one of our servers, but not having to maintain yet another thing is always nice. In fact, I’m thinking of moving the main website over to Github Pages with a similar setup. And maybe even our wiki, since content is not really updated that often and contributors are very few. A Hugo theme like DocDock, or Material Docs would possibly fit fine, but it would take some effort to convert all existing content.

Since Github only supports Jekyll natively for automatically building the website, I needed to find a way to have at least a semi-automated way to build and update the content. While there are some instructions in Hugo’s documentation on how to do that, I wasn’t particularly happy with any of them. So I ended up doing something a bit different. I have everything detailed in my personal blog.

All in all, I like the new setup. It looks nice and it’s really simple to create new posts using markdown. And who knows, maybe I’ll get to update this a bit more often than the old one.