Last week I moved from Pelican to Hugo as the static site generator used to publish this website. The decision wasn’t easy, Pelican had served me well for many years, it’s easy to use, reliable and I had heavily customized the website’s theme to fit my needs.

However, the version I was using was pretty old and I ran into several issues when updating to the new one. Also, Pelican’s Python dependencies and virtual environment setup were a bit of a hassle to deal with.

Hugo, on the other hand, is super easy to install and use. Installation on a Mac is basically:

brew install hugo

That’s it, no Python virtual environment or dependencies required. It has an easy to understand structure, it’s highly customizable, has an extensive and detailed documentation and renders the website really fast. Also, there are many themes available to choose from, which means you don’t have to start from scratch.

So, everything is great, it makes complete sense to migrate from Pelican, right?. Not exactly. In order to make the switch quickly, I needed to make some hard decisions. I could have worked around these issues, but I just couldn’t justify the extra time needed to deal with them. Therefore:

  • Links to previous posts changed. Which means that if you bookmarked an article, the link to it will be broken. However, all previous articles can easily be found through the search feature.
  • Disqus comments had to be reset, so previous comments will not be accesible.
  • The site’s RSS feed changed, so if you use an RSS reader to access the site, you will have to update that link.

I’m sorry for any inconveniences this move may have caused to some of you.

Thanks,

L.