Switched to Hugo

I switched to Hugo as static site generator for my blog on last Sunday. I was using Stagen, a static site generator wrote myself in Node.js, from March of 2016.

Why I Abandoned Stagen?

One reason is, I wanted to add further features to it, like sitemap generation, taxonomy, etc. However I am not getting enough free time to spare. Also, it is written in Node.js. I found it doesn’t feel comfortable writing JavaScript for this purpose, it looks like event driven nature of JS is not suitable for regular application development.

Alternative Thoughts

I was interested in porting Stagen to Python, but still time is the problem. Also had a plan to provide it as service once porting to Python is completed. I thought to provide web interface to manage content. So, it will attract people those are reluctant to using command line and wanted to manage content from mobile devices and while traveling without their laptops.

Why Hugo?

It is fast! Written in Go, it just have one binary without any dependencies. It has features like sitemap, taxonomy, theme support, etc.

Things I Miss in Hugo

There is no library support like in Stagen. In Stagen, we can have libraries of CSS and JS. It is something similar to Drupal. A library can depend one or more other libraries. For example we can have jQuery library and another custom functionality library for a particular content page, depending on jQuery library. We just need to specify the library to be loaded for a page, it will automatically resolve dependencies and load other libraries as required. I am using a workaround by specifying JS and CSS files to be loaded, within front-matter of the content and handling at theme.

Another con of Hugo is there no plugin support. It would be great if it has.