Changing to Hugo for my static site generator

So its been a while since I wrote a blog post, life! like it always does, has managed to get in the way.

To be honest for a while now, I was considering shutting the blog down. I mean who is really reading my mindless ramblings, posted to some dark and dusty corner of the internet.

Sadly this year has been a tough one, probably one of my toughest years to date. Mental health is still a very taboo topic from my experience and a lot of people don’t honestly like to discuss it. My mental health this year hasn’t been the best and so finding motivation let alone time to manage a blog has been hard. However, I started this blog because of one of those tough times and to let it go now, would devalue the positives that came from that awful experience.

One thing I have learned from such a tough year is the benefit of talking to others, especially friends. You should never carry the stresses of the world alone, eventually you will feel like your wading through mud, progress is so slow, you feel that you are getting nowhere. Remember keep talking! it really does help.

Now your probably wondering this blog post’s content so far, doesn’t really match the title. Well to explain that I was struggling with not only mental health issues but also time, leading me almost to giving up this blog, led me to reconsider my use of Eleventy as my static site generator. Eleventy or ‘11ty’ as its sometimes called is a great ‘SSG’ but the limited documentation and small number of tutorials meant that I originally had to learn a lot of the concepts the hard way. With such a gap not using the SSG to post anything, I soon forgot how to use it! images on the site would break as updates were made and I couldn’t find some of the limited tutorials I had used to get going, to fix some of the issues.

After battling through some of my mental health issues and coming out the other side, I decided to do some research in to a different SSG, maybe an easier to get going and work with SSG.

Introducing HUGO !!

Hugo’s Documentation from getting it installed, getting started and even how to get your shiny new site hosted on Codeberg/Gitlab/Github Pages (or alternatives) was like night and day compared to Eleventy. I chose a new theme for my site, transferred across my images and posts and was back up and running on Codeberg Pages within an hour. I found hundreds of tutorials which helped with some of the small issues I had and an endless supply of sites created using Hugo SSG, to see what I could achieve.

Needless to say , I’m Back ! not up to 100% but pretty close. I here stands testament to it, A shiny new site, a new Static site generator and a long overdue blog post.

For anyone going through similar issues, struggling with mental health, “Remember keep talking!”. Also if you start something you enjoy, for example a blog, but certain issues stall your progress, give yourself some time, research your options, you may find that you are able to completely redesign, something you might otherwise have given up and come out the other side the better for it.