# My Move to Hugo


<img src="/images/hugo-logo.svg" alt="Hugo" width="100px" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" />

Long gone are my days of hosting my website using a dynamic web content
management system like Wordpress or some custom PHP thing. My needs are simple
and a static site generator is perfect. A couple years ago, I was trying to
decide which one to choose and started with [Pelican](https://getpelican.com)
and it worked fine but I wanted something that felt a little more modern.
Enter [Hugo](https://gohugo.com).

## Background

I've had a website for many years at this point. I started with hosting
static html files at University of Maryland in my home directory. I thought it
was the coolest thing to be able to connect to my web pages from anywhere.

Then, when I was a Windows admin in a previous life, I hosted my site on IIS
using ASP pages and was able to write some dynamic content. I quickly followed
that with making my own site using PHP hosted on Apache and then Nginx. And,
of course, at some point I started using Wordpress, as one does. But... yuck.

## Pelican

I wanted to lower my attack surface by removing something like php from the
mix altogether. I wanted to host straight up HTML files, but did not want
to go through the hassle of managing a navigation structure, etc.  So I
tried Pelican.  I spent a lot of time getting the site working the way I
wanted and even found a theme that I could customize and make my own. I used
an old, un-maintained program called [Stork](https://stork-search.net). I
admittedly did not spend TOO much time working on how Stork presented its
data and I thought it looked... okay.

## Hugo

But recently, I had been seeing some Youtube videos about and sites built on
Hugo. So I decided to give it a try.

I'm so happy with it. It wasn't TOO difficult to bring over my content -- I
mean, we're only talking about 23 markdown files or so. But I was able to use
some sed and awk to change the Front Matter at the top of the files to match
Hugo's documentation. I had to fix some links, again with sed, and then I had
to spend some time getting image display working the way I wanted.  But I
am extremely happy with the result.

I found the [Tailroad](https://github.com/Sathishbs/Tailroad/) theme and I
really didn't have to customize it that much to make it fit my needs. In
fact, being able to copy files from SITEDIR/themes/tailroad/layouts to
SITEDIR/layouts and make my modifications without actually touching the
Tailroad files directly is awesome. Tailroad includes the ability to use
Hugo's json output mechanism to generate a searchable index, but it was not
as robust as I wanted.

I decided to go with [Pagefind](https://pagefind.app) for local searching.
After building my site with `hugo build`, I run `pagefind --site public
--output-path static/pagefind` to create the index.  Then I followed [JP
Verkamp's](https://blog.jverkamp.com/2023/09/25/adding-local-search-to-hugo-with-pagefind/#actually-implementing-search)
Blog to see how to integrate the search into my site. I just had to modify
a little bit of the Tailwind code (in my SITEDIR/layouts directory) so that
I could submit a search to a search.md page from the navigation bar.

## Conclusion

Take a [look around](/) and let me know what you think. I'm pretty happy with
the results so far.