I’ve used Jekyll as a static site generator ever since I created this blog, which was in 2013. Before that, I had tried few other blogging platforms. Over the past few years when I irregularly updated my blog, I faced some friction with Jekyll. Every time I tried to make a new post and push to GitHub, Jekyll would complain about something that’s either deprecated or broken. And, I had to go fix that first and then make a blog post and push it. That was a minor annoyance mostly due to the fact that I hardly touched my blog and things got outdated. But what annoyed me more than anything is the slowness of Jekyll to build the site and start the server. It was taking a good 10 seconds for it to build the entire site (which consisted of less than 30 files) and serve it on localhost.

On the other hand, in the last few months I have been tinkering with few Raspberry Pis and started self-hosting few things. I’m not done self-hosting everything I wanted, so there will be more playing around and more learnings that come out of it. This gives me a good opportunity to write about what I learned during the process so that people (including myself) can benefit from it.

And finally, I recently stumbled upon the IndieWeb movement when I was checking out few Mastodon instances and I got super intrigued about it. There was good enough support for Hugo in the IndieWeb community. More details about what got me into IndieWeb movement in an other post. I’ll also probably create a separate post about how I added IndieWeb support to my blog.

So, I decided to switch the static site generator to something better. I looked around, tried a few and finally settled on Hugo for two main reasons - it’s fast and it has good community support.

Since the switch, I’ve tweaked the theme to suit my needs, and added few specific pages that I think are important. Let’s see where this takes me.