Out with the old…

Discontent with the WordPress

A long time ago when I started with this blog, there was no real plan. I read that blogs are usually done in WordPress and rolled with it.

But over time I was so unhappy that even the mere thought of writing about something I enjoy was immediately dampened by the struggles I had.

The never-ending updates to plugins, the theme I chose but didn't really understand and especially my troubles with images - I was just overwhelmed.

Static Generated sites to the rescue

As you might have guessed, this isn't an area where I am well-versed. My first run-in with static sites was when Chad Baldwin mentioned on the SQL Server Slack channel having a blog on GitHub Pages using Jekyll. I didn't pay attention then - it also seemed like a lot of work.

Enter Hugo

But then later both Kendra Little wrote about Moving from WordPress to Hugo and Cathrine Wilhelmsen wrote about Goodbye WordPress, Hello Hugo wrote about it as well, it grabbed my attention. Especially the choice of Hugo - being able to build a site with simple Markdown and preview it almost instantly. Then you can use an automatic pipeline to publish it (to Azure Static Website for example).

I'm not gonna go into details about how to set it all up because I've used Kendra's amazing article (in fact so much, that it feels like stealing). I can also recommend Justin Bird wrote about Hugo series and Mike Dane's tutorials on YouTube.

The one recommendation I can give? Find a page on your favourite tech person's blog that has images, code samples, etc. and try to copy it on your blog. That way you can see how it would compare.

It's alive

The Markdown and code-first approach to blogging resonated with me so much, that I switched from WordPress even though this site is still very much a work in progress.

There is still a lot of work ahead, but this time I'm optimistic. I'm tracking planned features and post ideas on the GitHub project board.

Thank you for reading