Hugo, the static website engine, not the award.

I’ve grown frustrated with Wordpress and Dreamhost. Running a Wordpress site on a shared web host is a ticking time bomb. More users crowded on a server. I threw turned on caching and Cloudflare; readers should have had little trouble using the site, but my sessions were consistently timing out while using the admin dashboard, which makes posting new content a frustrating experience.

Wordpress on it’s own is fine, especially on dedicated servers. I’ve run hundreds of thousands of requests/day through Wordpress and it can handle it well, as long as you give it the right hardware.

Dreamhost, as well, isn’t at fault. I pay for fairly cheap hosting, and they don’t have much control over the efficiency of the apps that their shared hosting customers run.

So in comes Hugo.

There’s a bunch of static site generators around, like jekyll or octopress. I wanted to write in Markdown, I wanted it to be fast, and I wanted it to be flexible. After playing around with a few generators, I was sold.

I can basically write a blog post really quick, save it, and run a script that will generate the static pages, commit the changes to Github, and rsync it to this site.

There may be a few formatting errors in the older posts, but I imported everything from Wordpress, converted it to Markdown, and kept all of the permalinks the same. All told, maybe twelve hours of work and I have a blog I’m not frustrated to look at anymore.