Hugo

I have been using Jekyll for quite some time. Quite possibly since the beginning of this blog. I have now migrated to Hugo. There wasn’t a strong reason to do so. Jekyll was serving me just fine up until now. I even used Jekyll for the Windmill website.

Why do it then? I just felt like doing something productive and wanted something to tinker with. Hugo seems more geared towards building a website as opposed to just a blog and I would like this website to evolve.

It took me about 2 days to migrate. I didn’t use any of the existing tools as I wanted to get familiar with Hugo. The most time consuming was making sure, yet again, that permalinks don’t change. In the 10 years of this website’s lifespan, I had to deal with this at least 2-3 times that I can remember.

Hugo apparently generates permalinks in the form of https://qnoid.com/hugo/#main compared to what this website has been using, https://qnoid.com/Hugo.html#main.

To be honest, I don’t recall the later format being a concious decision on my part but obviously didn’t care enough at the time. I don’t even know what the “canonical” format for URLs is. I didn’t want to open this can of worms.

I made sure to salvage the permalink for most of the posts. For those that had some obscure formatting due to using the title of a post at the time, I didn’t bother. Life is too short. The good news is that the most prominent posts weren’t affected so cheers to that.

While feeling the pain of salvaging the permalinks, I did begin to wonder. How can we better handle permanent redirects? I kinda wish for a way to “track” a resource across a URL the way Git can track a file across name changes.

Now that I have migrated the website, I have a big announcement coming up about the future of Windmill.