Blog Using Static Site Generator & Theme Update
Table of Contents
Overview
So, just thought that it was worth noting that many things have changed. Perhaps even for the better. I have moved from Jekyll to Hugo as the static site generator for this blog. Jekyll is an awesome framework, but I needed to be able to edit this content cross platform without constantly pushing to GitLab after every change to verify that it worked.
Note that this is not a tutorial on Hugo. This is merely a brief look at some edits I made to this blog.
About Moving Away From Jekyll
Note that I don’t have anything against Jekyll. It’s a fantastic platform for generating static sites. But, Ruby is a little flaky on Windows and you need to do a bit of manual configuration to path variables to make Bundler and Jekyll functional. This would all work as expected on my FreeBSD and Linux machines/VMs though.
A Little Note On Scoop
To install Golang and Hugo I used Scoop as the package manager. With Scoop, it is easy to install packages. You’ll enter the following PowerShell command after setting your execution policy to RemoteSigned. This will install scoop on the workstation.
PS C:\> iex (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://get.scoop.sh')
After Scoop is finished installing you enter the following command to install Golang. Scoop will then presume to download a zip file from it’s chosen repositories and install Golang after unpacking it.
PS C:\> scoop install go
When Golang installation is complete. You can presume to install Hugo, as seen the following command.
PS C:\> scoop install hugo
Normally, you don’t need to worry about errors. Also, you normally don’t need to worry about whether or not Go or Hugo will work after it is installed when using Scoop.
Below is the website for Scoop.
Now that I got that out of my system. Time to discuss Hugo for a bit. I am really enjoying Hugo. It works, customization is simple and straight forward. I can also edit my site and test with Hugo on my Windows boxes without having to spin up a VM. Happy happy.
It is structured similar to Jekyll, so there wasn’t much of a learning curve. I just moved over what little content I had and I was good to go. One useful thing about Hugo is how easy it is to configure themes. Which is just as simple as creating a git submodule into the themes directory and edit your config file to reference it.
About The New Theme
The theme I am using right now is named Terminal and it was developed by panr. If you would like to use this theme I have shared a link below to the repository. I have also provided a link to panr’s Github for reference to his other repositories.
Moving To Hugo
For those who read this and they are interested in Hugo. I have provided a link to their documentation. Mostly for my own use, but it may be useful to others as well.
Anyway, moving to Hugo for this site wasn’t difficult. It only took a few minutes because Hugo uses Markdown for posts as well. All I had to do was copy the files from the old site and paste them into the newly appointed Hugo site. It took about 10 minutes to do with https://n3s0.gitlab.io . So, now that I have something that I can use almost anywhere, readers can expect there to be more and more content posted each day.
I’m not finished tinkering with the site either. But, when I make a change I will make sure to post an update of my thoughts on it.