Blog Update

As of tonight, I've now completed the final stage of transitioning my blog from Ghost to Hugo.

As you may have known, my blog has been powered by Ghost for a few years. It's definitely served me well. However, a while ago I started to like the idea of static sites. Seeing as my blog is essentially a list of static posts, it felt a bit weird that the pages were being served dynamically. So, I started on the journey of moving to Hugo.

It took a bit of work to adapt my existing theme to work with Hugo's template system. But I managed to get it pretty similar, while also adding a few improvements at the same time.^[1]

Of course, being a static site, pages now load super fast, and they're extremely lightweight. But that's not the only good thing about using Hugo. It's also super easy to host other static pages alongside the source Markdown post files. This means I can build mini-sites for my apps, and keep them managed within my blog. I can control the structure of the site better, either by using categories/tags or by structuring the source files in the way I want them to be generated. And another great one, I can now create custom pages and templates. For example, I built a custom archive page for all of the posts on the blog, and a few extras that as a bit different for essays and travel updates.

In the early version of this new Hugo blog, I had it being deployed to a Digital Ocean app via a GitHub action that was triggered after pushing new posts. But, that didn't allow me full control of the VM it was running from, so I decided to switch to a droplet (VM), and have built my own minimal installation.

Obviously, Hugo is installed, but apart from that the only other things I had to install was nginx and certbot. So very minimal. I was wondering how I'd manage the deployment, because I still wanted to have the site automatically rebuild after pushing my changes. Luckily, I found a guide by Josh Hausotter that shows you how to configure a remote repository on your Digital Ocean droplet and a "post receive" action that runs a script whenever changes are received to generate the static files and move them to the correct directory. I honestly never thought about using git this way.

As for how I write and publish my posts from my own machine. I do that using Neovim on my Mac, and then just pushing to the remote repository. Neovim might not be the most trendy tool for writers, but I find it works for me, and I also use it for writing code, so I'm pretty comfortable with the keybinds.

You may be wondering, what does this mean for you? Do you need to change anything? Well, in theory, no. The posts are now stored as static html files, however I have configured nginx for these to work without the extension, and the filenames/slugs haven't changed. Technically, the RSS feed is now different. Hugo generates the RSS feed in an index.xml file at the base of the site, which you can find here. However, I have set up directs for /feed and /rss, so you shouldn't need to do anything.

Hopefully, this change will go by mostly unnoticed. But if you do notice something odd, you know where to find me. (Links are at the bottom of the page)

Written: while watching Oblivion with my cat.