Built in Speed and Built for Speed by Hugo

This site is built by the snappy static site generator Hugo. There are many reasons to like this small binary, but the main attraction is pure speed.

I first spent an evening setting it up with Jekyll, Hugo’s turtle twin. When I finished that task, I had a site up and running, but I had lost the motivation for … writing!

There is a good reason why Ruby-programmers always lose at hackatons: When the competition is over, the Gems are just about finished installing. Even George Clooney has abandoned Ruby in favor of Go.

So I spent a couple of hours porting my new Jekyll-site to Hugo. A very short-lived Jekyll-site, it was.

I have never looked back.

Top 10 Reasons Why I like Hugo

Apart from number one, there are no obvious chronology to the list below, but numbered lists are nice:

1. Speed. It’s fast! It’s as fast as Jekyll is slow. Hugo is coded in Go¹, and that seems to help utilize all available cores to their limits. This site is still very small, so a full rebuild is just a handfull centiseconds. But out of curiosity I generated a thousand dummy-pages, and we’re still talking just a second or two build time. For bigger sites there are no other static options out there known to me.
2. Easy install. No myriads of Gems². It’s multi-platform and distributed as one binary per platform. Copy and execute. Nothing beats that simplicity.
3. This is the same for all static site generators, but nothing beats this ease of deployment: Copy. It can even be hosted for free on GitHub.
4. The static side of it also means that even serving the pages will be blistering fast, and without worries of getting arm-wrestled by some Russian hacker named Ivan.
5. The livereload-feature is just great, and a recent commit made it even better (soft reloading of CSS- and image-changes). Nothing beats writing articles in a text-editor with instant preview in the browser. This is WYSIWYRG³.
6. It’s backed by Blackfriday, a fast and very good Markdown-renderer written in Go. I read on GitHub that Asciidoctor-support is on it’s way, and that is good stuff for longer documents.
7. A small, but helpful community. Check it out on the forum or at GitHub.
8. It integrates with Pygments for server-side syntax highlighting. Pygments is Python, so relatively slow, but it looks great.
9. The documentation is easy on the eye and it looks like it has been through some comprehensive and good copy-editing. But after using Hugo for a while, I get a feeling that many details are missing, and it is in badly need of a search engine.
10. Did I mention the fact that it’s fast?

Some Stuff I Don’t Like

It’s not all happiness. Almost, but not completely:

• The error messages could be more informative. I have been on a few goose-chases chasing rendering-issues, only to realize I was missing some bracket in a shortcode in some file.
• The template-support could be better, It’s currently a little bit like PHP-include; no decorator- or inheritance-constructions, which make for some not very well-formed templates. And the Go-templates have some scoping issues that is a little hard to wrap my head around. But I notice support for other template-engines are on its way.
• There are themes support and there are themes. But most of those I have looked at looks kind of … not fantastic pretty. And you have to run the theme to see how it looks. But Hugo is still young, I’m shure this is coming.
• Some obvious key-features are still missing; like some proper pagination-support (there are currently some basic support for back and next).
• Related to the above: Hugo is open source, but still looks much like a one-man project – and the one man being Steve Francia. There are some contributions tickling in from others, but not many. Maybe the ongoing license-change from SimPL-2.0 to the more widely used Apache 2 will help. Several people, including people inside Google, have said that this could be a major brake, pulling back on getting people to share their work.
  
• As this is Go with its static linking, extending Hugo = recompiling Hugo. No obvious plugin support.
• It’s static, so creating dynamic stuff isn’t as obvious as in the WordPress-world. But there’s no one stopping you from talking to backends with JavaScript, and I guess that’s how many (most?) sites are built today. And shortcodes make it easy to embed external services into your pages, like galleries and videos.

That’s about it. I notice Hugo has built this in the background while I was writing it. It looks fine. Push publish …

Other Random Notes

… no, wait a minute … I might as well mention some of the non-Hugo-related items that helped me create this simple site:

• It’s built upon Lanyon, a Jekyll-theme (!) created by one of the Bootstrap-founders, Mark Otto.
• The (current) fonts used are Adelle Slab Serif and Adelle Sans⁴.
• It uses a few components from Bootstrap, buttons and responsive embeds (kudos to @mdo and @fat for making it that modularized!).
• The sharing bar is Socialite.
• jQuery is in use, but so minute it’s not even funny.
• I use LESS to produce CSS, and Grunt for all build tasks not supported by Hugo (LESS, JS-concatenation and -uglification, static file-fingerprinting …)

That’s it. Now publish.