Because I'm mad at Hugo

Most days I love using Hugo for my blog. It’s super fast, flexible, and runs as a single binary with no dependencies. It builds me a nice static website out of a bunch of Markdown files and I love everything about that. Except that sometimes it’s too much work. To post anything I have to create a new file, add the proper front matter, render the site, and push the changes to my server. And if I want any images in the post, I have to size them and copy them to the correct location, and then hand-write links to them. It’s not hard, but it’s still a lot of friction.

Over the past few days I’ve found myself trying to tweak Hugo to accommodate my daily post entries, and it has not been fun. I’ve been using Hugo for years and I still don’t understand the template hierarchy. And forget about doing anything difficult with Hugo’s Go templates and themes. It’s baffling to me. Yes, I understand that maybe I’m just a slow learner but I’m not convinced that’s the entire problem here.

And then this morning something just stopped working. A post wouldn’t render no matter what I tried. It was the last straw.

So here we are in Ghost. I often hate this too, but in a different way. Right now I prefer the way I hate Ghost.