Oh, which static site generator to use?

I end up on staticgen.com all the time with my mouth watering.

Jekyll, of course, has long been the top dog. It has the most mindshare primarily because Github Pages supports it out of the box. I’ve played around with Jekyll, and I’ve found it useful, and Ruby is always fun. For some reason I didn’t click with it, but for you it may be a good option. The internet is filling up with tutorials and content for Jekyll.

I’ve also played around a bit with Hexo. Hexo is build on Javascript, which of course I know well. I like Hexo. It was a while ago, but if I recall correctly I think it was less flexible than Jekyll. It would be easily extensible, written in Javascript, too.

So why Hugo? I occasionally attend a Golang meetup led by a friend, and I’ve found it intriguing. The promise of speedier site compilation and the simple file structure were appealing, so I decided to give it, shall we say, a go.

What really influences me to choose one or the other is the selection of themes. I’ll be honest: I’m terrible at front-end dev. Or, rather, I take literally forever to do it, and the result comes out OK. So I much prefer pre-built themes.

What’s important to me in a theme:

• Simple. It can’t have too many options or I’ll go crazy trying to pick the perfect color/font combo and tweak every setting. I have limited time as it is.
• SEO. As long as I’m going to be writing, it might as well be easily indexable/searchable.
• Professional. A website like this one establishes a personal brand, so it needs to look polished.

So here we are. I feel like there’s an obligatory sentiment that all first posts have that I need to express. I hope the content will be worthwhile for both me and for you, and that I’ll have the diligence to keep up the posts!

Until next time.