After many, many, many years running my blog on WordPress, I finally got tired of fussing around with convincing it to do what I want it to do, and trying to get it to perform well enough to not have to wait 20 seconds for page loads. I’m also wanting to shift away from hoarding all of my content online.
I had been experimenting with Jekyll, but it was so unbelievably slow to generate the static HTML for this site that I had to give up on it. I’m now running on Hugo. It’s a native binary application that runs on my laptop, so generation is really fast. It took less than 4 seconds to generate the full website for all 2,818 posts for this blog!
It looks pretty configurable, so I’ll be tweaking things over the next couple of weeks to get it working how I want it. . I’m still setting it up, but I plan to have all old content moved over asap. I used the WordPress exporter for Jekyll to generate source HTML files from my WordPress database - it’s a bit quirky and it looks like many characters got munged in the process. Posts are also displaying some weird metadata, but that’s minor. Those raw content files work just fine in Hugo, too.
For now, I run Hugo on my laptop to generate the static files, then rsync that to the Reclaim Hosting server. I need to figure out how to better automate the publishing process, but it’s pretty painless so far.
Anyway. If you can read this, it worked. The RSS feed should be generated properly, as well.