Switching to Hugo

Recently I’ve overhauled the entirety of the framework I was using for my website. I was getting tired of the constraints and limitations—and inefficiencies—of the script I had written to statically generate my website in PHP. So finally I decided to switch to a real static site generator: Hugo.

I’ve always looked at Hugo from a distance since every time I’ve tried it I’ve been daunted by the difficulty of learning its entire framework and what all these different components are (like “taxonomies” and “terms”). Honestly, I still don’t know what most of these are. But I’ve managed to get my website up in Hugo at last. This has come along with several (minor) changes to the structure and look—though most links should remain the same with the exception of the RSS feed and the now-removed Atom feed (sorry).

The main reason I liked Hugo as opposed to going back to something like saait was that Hugo offers more flexibility in how I structure my website—something I take very seriously—and also it allows me to write some of my blog posts in Markdown, which for small posts like this is much appreciated—though I’ll still use HTML for the longer ones, like a post I have on AI coming up, since I still like using the reference and notes lists at the bottom of my longer articles. It is also a lot more efficient at generating the website, and (most importantly) it can spawn a test server which updates the content every time I modify one of these files so I can see it in real-time. Could I write a program that also does this? Perhaps. Do I want to or have time to do so? Absolutely not.

Two more changes you’ll find regarding my website are first that I have changed the licensing of my webpages to “all rights reserved.” I don’t think this decision should affect things much since before it was CC-BY-ND, which didn’t permit derivatives anyways. The only thing that changes is I have more of a say if you decide to publish the entirety of one of my pages—namely one of my articles—on another site. According to fair use you can still obviously quote me, and if you really feel like publishing one of my works I’ll probably say “yes” if you send me an e-mail. I simply decided it’d be better to take more responsibility for my works on the internet.

The second change you’ll notice is that I have removed my website’s repository from my Github and my personal repository hosting—in reality I’ve made it private in my personal repository hosting. The reason is that by relicensing my website to “all rights reserved” I don’t want the hassle of maintaining another license regarding the website code itself conflicting with that.

Anyways, that’s all for now. God bless!