Bye Textpattern - Hello Hugo

October 15, 2020

Time to try something new - as of today, my blog is supported by Hugo, a open-source static page generator, written in Go.

I'm leaving Textpattern, which I adopted in 2014. Using Textpattern and the Textile syntax was a great step towards a more simple and minimalistic blog which I always strived after.

Things I'm looking forward to:

  • Static content - After my old Ubuntu VM (running on Amazon AWS) hung itself up due to some kind of thread problem, I knew I had to change something. For a simple blog, it shouldn't be necessary in 2020 to maintain a separate server.
  • Default Markdown support - For Textpattern, I wrote a lot in Textile, but I always wanted to return to Markdown. I added a plugin later to Textpattern, but still had some issues. Currently, I like writing in VS Code, my current favourite text editor, which even has an excellent preview!
  • Posts as pages - Extracting all the posts out of Textpattern was kind of a pain, so I look forward to having my posts as simple text files - portable, plain text, as simple as possible.
  • Web server included - Just running hugo server and getting a full webserver (incl. hot reloading, file serving etc.) is a big plus.
  • Theming - A lot of great themes available at themes.gohugo.io
  • SEO - I didn't really care for SEO up until and still don't want to spend time on it, but if it's included, I'll gladly take it if comes free :-)
  • Tag cloud - Check out the /tags page and crawl through my old posts by keyword!

Thanks & happy reading!