Jekyll is dead, long live Hugo!
Table of Contents
Over the past few days I’ve been revamping oodavid.com in terms of direction and style. While considering my work I took the opportunity to also review my choice of static-site-generator (SSG).
Jekyll was such a no-brainer at the time; SSGs were in their infancy and GitHub offers free generating and hosting of Jekyll sites. The development cost to me was negligable. Fast-forward a number of years and the SSG space has exploded, in fact, it feels like the choice of programming languages grows with a power-law!
Direction
The rationale behind the blog revamp is simple; I’m focussing on a few core technologies that I’m using more regularly; namely Angular and Firebase.
While I won’t restrict myself to these technologies (I’m digging into nativescript at the moment), the resolve is useful in helping me decide what to write about.
If I was naive to give myself a moonshot goal, it would be to become a Google Developer Expert for Firebase. The limiting factor here is really on of time; I’m employed full-time, have a newborn and dedicate a lot of time to exercise and reading.
Style
Purple-pink gradients? That’s so 2017.
It may seem like a radical departure from the previous style, but that’s largely aesthetics. In terms of layout the site is nigh-on identical, we have a single-column with:
- Header
- Navbar
- Content
- Footer
UX is hard, until it isn’t - for oodavid.com I couldn’t justify the effort of departing from the perfectly functional structure.

NPM Task Runner
I use Grunt, Gulp and npm as day-to-day task-runners, but never found the urge to add this to my blog - the purity of a vanilla setup is really appealing! Well, that time has gone; I’ve taken the opportunity to add a simple NPM task runner for this site. At the time of writing I’ve only got two tasks running:
- Build or Serve Hugo
- Compile SASS
On my roadmap I’ve earmarked the need for running ngrok so that I can test how any given article renders when shared to different platforms. I could use my IP address, but that doesn’t exactly scale.
Hosting with Netlify
The last peice of this extremely simple puzzle is hosting. I first started using Netlify at Accredible a number of months ago. In the time we’ve worked with the system I’ve seen it go from strength to strength.
This is a product that presents itself very simply (static site deployment), but in reality they have an amazing set of features with such good defaults you don’t need to change anything.
- Git Integration
- CDN Hosting
- Runs
npm
andpython
- Automatic
SSL
provisioning withLet's Encrypt
- Prerendering
- Split Testing
- Form Submission Hooks - these allow you to pipe data to Zapier for further processing
In Memory of Jekyll
