Jekyll is dead, long live Hugo!


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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:

UX is hard, until it isn’t - for oodavid.com I couldn’t justify the effort of departing from the perfectly functional structure.

Even Facebook is getting in on the purple-pink action.

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:

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.

In Memory of Jekyll

oodavid on Jekyll - R.I.P.