Since the start of running my personal blog, I have utilized Ghost as my hosting provider. It has proven to be a wonderful tool, however, for my personal blog, it felt like a bit ... much.

Why I moved to Hugo

As you may have noticed, the look of my personal blog has changed quite a bit.

I am still focusing on a minimalistic approach to the design of the blog, but I wanted to make it lighter and more bandwidth friendly.

With that being said, about a month ago, I started looking into Static Site Generators.

I explored Gatsby, Eleventy, Hugo, Nuxt, and much more. However, it appears that Hugo has won my attention, as I decided to move my blog over to Hugo, hosted on Netlify!

My decision to move to Hugo was based on two reasons. The template I found, Stack by Jimmy is a wonderfully minimalistic starter theme that is available in Hugo, and the Go language is a language I would like to explore in the future. Hugo being written in Go just felt like it would naturally help me learn Go (it may not, but that was my thought process!)

On the side of being more bandwidth friendly, my blog now has an uncompressed size of 197KB. That is about 10% of what it was beforehand! With Ghost, because of all the additional javascript, my blog was coming in a bit under 2MB uncompressed, which is rather large for a personal blog that didn't have many images on it!

Bandwidth costs money for a lot of people, and I wouldn't want to unnecessarily utilize someones precious bandwidth by having a bloated website that doesn't even utilize all of the features provided by the platform it is using.

So here we are! This is my blog on Hugo.

Was it difficult to move?

Not really. There is a wonderful tool called ghostToHugo that allows you to take a Ghost Blog's json export, and pull out all your blog posts and pages.

The only issues I ran into was my images not being included in that, and some custom Ghost cards not allowing to be migrated, such as callouts and bookmark cards.

With that being said, after 15 minutes of editing my 40ish blog posts, I was able to successfully convert all my posts over to a nice markdown format that Hugo can read.

After that, it was as simple as uploading the .md files to my Git repository, and Netlify handled the rest!

Any future changes planned?

At this time, probably not. I would like to look into hosting this website by myself, without the need of a third party hosting provider. I like Netlify, but I don't want to be reliant on them when it comes to hosting my website.

Other than that? I just hope to focus on writing some more posts. I have some ideas that I want to write about, so expect to see them soon!